At the edge of life you feel that you are no longer master of the life within you, that subjectivity is an illusion, and that uncontrollable forces are seething inside you, evolving with no relation to a personal center or a definite, individual rhythm.

Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its own multiplicity and its own unity, of its own imperfection and its own perfection. All the opposites are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there. The concept of God is the way in which we understand this incredible fact that what cannot be, yet is.

It was Rudolf Carnap's dream for the last three decades of his life to show that science proceeds by a formal syntactic method; today no one to my knowledge holds out any hope for that project.

God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.

As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs, then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.

Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

I am attached to Christianity at large; much from conviction; more from affection.

Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas. Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.

The precepts "Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you" ... are born from the Gospel's profound spirit of individualism, which refuses to let one's own actions and conduct depend in any way on somebody else's acts. The Christian refuses to let his acts be mere reactions-such conduct would lower him to the level of his enemy. The act is to grow organically from the person, "as the fruit from the tree." ... What the Gospel demands is not a reaction which is the reverse of the natural reaction, as if it said: "Because he strikes you on the cheek, tend the other"-but a rejection of all reactive activity, of any participation in common and average ways of acting and standards of judgment.

Fate is not in man but around him.

When in the spring the withered gray of the pastures gives place to green, this is due to the millions of young shoots which sprout up freshly from the old roots. In like manner the revival of thought which is essential for our time can only come through a transformation of the opinions and ideals of the many brought about by individual and universal reflection about the meaning of life and of the world.

I simply don't think it is reasonable to use IQ tests to produce results of questionable value, which may then serve to justify racists in their own minds and to help bring about the kinds of tragedies we have already witnessed earlier in this century.

But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves? Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world, yet is every man his greatest enemy, and as it were, his own executioner.

Before a science can develop principles, it must possess concepts. Before a law of gravitation could be formulated, it was necessary to have the notions of "acceleration" and "weight."

The whole is a riddle, an aenigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspence of judgment appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape, into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.

Milton Ashe is not the type to marry a head of hair and a pair of eyes.

The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up. That is possible for him who never argues and strives with men and facts, but in all experience retires upon himself, and looks for the ultimate cause of things in himself.

All these people talk so eloquently about getting back to good old-fashioned values. Well, as an old poop I can remember back to when we had those old-fashioned values, and I say let's get back to the good old-fashioned First Amendment of the good old-fashioned Constitution of the United States-and to hell with the censors! Give me knowledge or give me death!

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.

The Left's identity politics poses a threat to free speech and to the kind of rational discourse needed to sustain a democracy... The focus on lived experience by identity groups prioritizes the emotional world of the inner self over the rational examination of issues in the outside world and privileges sincerely held opinions over a process of reasoned deliberation that may force one to abandon prior opinions.

The functional regions of the brain which subserve physical agony, the "pain centres", and the mainly limbic substrates of emotion, appear in phylogenetic terms to be remarkably constant in the vertebrate line. The neural pathways involving serotonin, the periaquaductal grey matter, bradykinin, dynorphin, ATP receptors, the major opioid families, substance P etc all existed long before hominids walked the earth. Not merely is the biochemistry of suffering disturbingly similar where not effectively type-identical across a wide spectrum of vertebrate (and even some invertebrate) species. It is at least possible that members of any species whose members have more pain cells exhibiting greater synaptic density than humans sometimes suffer more atrociously than we do, whatever their notional "intelligence".

If self-knowledge does not lead to knowing oneself before God - well, then there is something to what purely human self-observation says, namely, this self-knowledge leads to a certain emptiness that produces dizziness. Only by being before God can one totally come to oneself in the transparency of soberness.

Positivism ... implies the double falsehood that no interpretation is needed, and that it is not needed because the story which the positivist writer tells, such as it is, is obvious. The story he or she tells is usually a bad one, and its being obvious only means that it is familiar.

One of the commonplaces of modern historiography is the polemical exaltation of the civilization of the Renaissance over and against medieval civilization. This is not just the expression of a typical misunderstanding, since this mentality is the effect of one among the innumerable deceptions purposely spread in modern culture by the leaders of global subversion. The truth is that after the collapse of the ancient world, if there ever was a civilization that deserves the name of Renaissance, this was the civilization of the Middle Ages. In its objectivity, its virile spirit, its hierarchical structure, its proud antihumanistic simplicity so often permeated by the sense of the sacred, the Middle Ages represented a return to the origins.

An empire derives no advantage from the caresses of two turtledoves who spend a year cooing to each other in public meetings.

We have always thought that Mr. Darwin has unnecessarily hampered himself by adhering so strictly to his favourite "Natura non facit saltum." We greatly suspect that she does make considerable jumps in the way of variation now and then, and that these saltations give rise to some of the gaps which appear to exist in the series of known forms.

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.

The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.

Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you - you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.

God is the Immanent Cause of all things, never truly transcendent from them.

Every love to which there clings but the smallest speck of obligation is an unselfish love, and, so far as this speck reaches, a possessedness. He who believes that he owes the object of his love anything loves romantically or religiously.

The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence whatsoever in favor of its truth.

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

It is freedom, it is particularity, it is solitude that we are aiming at, and not Evil for its own sake.

Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.

Be not swept off your feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, "Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you."

Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions. 

We can not... escape the conclusion that the rule of reasoning by recurrence is irreducible to the principle of contradiction. ...Neither can this rule come to us from experience... This rule, inaccessible to analytic demonstration and to experience, is the veritable type of the synthetic a priori judgment. On the other hand, we can not think of seeing in it a convention, as in some of the postulates of geometry. ...it is only the affirmation of the power of the mind which knows itself capable of conceiving the indefinite repetition of the same act when once this act is possible. The mind has a direct intuition of this power, and experience can only give occasion for using it and thereby becoming conscious of it.

Writing turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech; writing was the visualization of acoustic space. It lit up the dark.

To this end they make a shield of their hypocritical zeal for religion. They go about invoking the Bible, which they would have minister to their deceitful purposes. Contrary to the sense of the Bible and the intention of the holy Fathers, if I am not mistaken, they would extend such authorities until even in purely physical matters - where faith is not involved - they would have us altogether abandon reason and the evidence of our senses in favor of some biblical passage, though under the surface meaning of its words this passage may contain a different sense.

In the Thirty Years' War... a third of the population of central Europe were killed in a bloody struggle between different Christian religious sects, and the pragmatic part of liberalism was to take final ends [defined by religions] out of political discussion... and to lower the sights of politics to defend life itself, and not "the good life"... as defined by a particular sect of a particular religion.

An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automation, is the most developed form of production by machinery.

If we endeavor to form our conceptions upon history and life, we remark three classes of men. The first consists of those for whom the chief thing is the qualities of feelings. These men create art. The second consists of the practical men, who carry on the business of the world. They respect nothing but power, and respect power only so far as it [is] exercized. The third class consists of men to whom nothing seems great but reason. If force interests them, it is not in its exertion, but in that it has a reason and a law. For men of the first class, nature is a picture; for men of the second class, it is an opportunity; for men of the third class, it is a cosmos, so admirable, that to penetrate to its ways seems to them the only thing that makes life worth living.

...racial hatred is not a natural phenomenon innate in man. It is the product of ideologies. But even if such a thing as a natural and inborn hatred between various races existed, it would not render social cooperation futile and would not invalidate Ricardo's theory of association. Social cooperation has nothing to do with personal love or with a general commandment to love one another. People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.

As soon as the discourse is about a holy spirit, about believing in the holy spirit, how many do you think believe in that? Or when the discourse is about an evil spirit that should be renounced: how many do you think believe in such a thing? How can this be? Is it perhaps because the subject becomes too earnest when it is the holy spirit? For I can talk about, believe in, the spirit of the age, the spirit of the world, and the like and do not thereby need to think of anything specific. It is a kind of spirit, but I am not absolutely bound by what I say. And not being bound by what one says is highly prized.

For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance.

No nation which has sunk into this state of dependence can raise itself out of it by the means which have usually been adopted hitherto. Since resistance was useless to it when it was still in possession of all its powers, what can such resistance avail now that it has been deprived of the greater part of them?

If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love. ... We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true. ... Which deception is more dangerous?