The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

Ever from one who comes to-morrow Men wait their good and truth to borrow.

Man is a reasoning animal.

Write in the sand the flaws of your friend.

Germany is now a field of cadavers, soon she will be a paradise.

In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.

It's quite true that there were billions of years that I didn't exist that I was never bothered about.

Life itself is sitting in a room with a murderer, while eating a nice meal. You're just waiting for the meal to be over...

LIFE is the terrible condition.

Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails.

What objection is there in reason to there being no other purpose in the sum of things save only to exist and happen as it does exist and happen? For him who places himself outside of himself, none; but for him who lives and suffers and desires within himself - for him it is a question of life or death.

It lays down, as is generally known, that our speculations upon all subjects whatsoever, pass necessarily through three successive stages: a Theological stage, in which free play is given to spontaneous fictions admitting of no proof; the Metaphysical stage, characterized by the prevalence of personified abstractions or entities; lastly, the Positive stage, based upon an exact view of the real facts of the case.

But bounty and hospitality very seldom lead to extravagance; though vanity almost always does.

Those who cannot find moral clarity are likely to settle for the far more dangerous simplicity, or purity, instead.

The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or men who love living.

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

I assert(1) There is no method of discovering a scientific theory.(2) There is no method of ascertaining the truth [i.e., verification] of a scientific hypothesis...(3) There is no method of ascertaining whether a hypothesis is 'probable', in the sense of the probability calculus.

The chalk is no unimportant element in the masonry of the earth's crust, and it impresses a peculiar stamp, varying with the conditions to which it is exposed, on the scenery of the districts in which it occurs.

This life affords no solid satisfaction, but in the consciousness of having done well, and the hopes of another life.

Nothing is more impressive than the fact that as mathematics withdrew increasingly into the upper regions of ever greater extremes of abstract thought, it returned back to earth with a corresponding growth of importance for the analysis of concrete fact. ...The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions - only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.

From the fundamental nature of the Philistine, it follows that, in regard to others, as he has no intellectual but only physical needs, he will seek those who are capable of satisfying the latter not the former. And so of all the demands he makes of others the very smallest will be that of any outstanding intellectual abilities. On the contrary, when he comes across these they will excite his antipathy and even hatred. For here he has a hateful feeling of inferiority and also a dull secret envy which he most carefully attempts to conceal even from himself; but in this way it grows sometimes into a feeling of secret rage and rancour. Therefore it will never occur to him to assess his own esteem and respect in accordance with such qualities, but they will remain exclusively reserved for rank and wealth, power and influence, as being in his eyes the only real advantages to excel in which is also his desire.

If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.

Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition, and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders.

Every man is, no doubt, by nature, first and principally recommended to his own care; and as he is fitter to take care of himself than of any other person, it is fit and right that it should be so.

Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this.

The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.

Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.

A physician, after he had felt the pulse of Pausanias, and considered his constitution, saying, "He ails nothing," "It is because, sir," he replied, "I use none of your physic."

The subversive character of truth inflicts upon thought an imperative quality. Logic centers on judgments which are, as demonstrative propositions, imperatives, - the predicative "is" implies an "ought." ... Verification of the proposition involves a process in fact as well as in thought: (S) must become that which it is. The categorical statement thus turns into a categorical imperative; it does not state a fact but the necessity to bring about a fact. For example, it could be read as follows: man is not (in fact) free, endowed with inalienable rights, etc., but he ought to be.

If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate-in short, emancipation of fear-then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render.

The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes; the ignorance of more remote ages, the simplicity of rural life, and the rusticity of the villager have not been preserved among them; and they are alike unacquainted with the virtues, the vices, the coarse habits, and the simple graces of an early stage of civilization.

The evil of totalitarianism is not only that it fails to protect specific liberties but that it extinguishes the very possibility of freedom.

It is our deliberate opinion that the French Revolution, in spite of all its crimes and follies, was a great blessing to mankind.

In brief, all this Mammon-Gospel, of Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached on Earth; or altogether the shabbiest.

It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending.

Verily we know nothing. Truth is buried deep.

And these were the dishes wherein to me, hunger-starven for thee, they served up the sun and the moon.

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.

Men looke not at the greatnesse of the evill past, but the greatnesse of the good to follow.

Economics is on the side of humanity now.

Having given up autonomy, reason has become an instrument.

Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Sadness makes you God's prisoner.

Consider that we shouldn't call our brother a fool, since we don't know ourselves what we are.

Mathematics takes us still further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the world, but every possible world, must conform.

Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.

The radical empiricist onslaught ... provides the methodological justification for the debunking of the mind by the intellectuals-a positivism which, in its denial of the transcending elements of Reason, forms the academic counterpart of the socially required behavior.

Economic man deals with the "real world" in all its complexity. Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastic simplified model... He makes his choices using a simple picture of the situation that takes into account just a few of the factors that he regards as most relevant and crucial.