The life-giving Spirit is the very one who slays you; the first thing the life-giving Spirit says is that you must enter into death, that you must die to, it is this way in order that you many not take Christianity in vain. A life-giving Spirit, that is the invitation; who would not willingly take hold of it! But die first, that is the halt!

There are many who know many things, yet are lacking in wisdom.

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder (including it is true, some of the attempts to suppress them). This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as heroes. 

China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.

No text in the tradition seems as lucid concerning the way in which the political is becoming worldwide. concerning the irreducibility of the technical and the media in the current of the most thinking thought-and this goes beyond the railroad and the newspapers of the time whose powers were analyzed in such an incomparable way in the Manifesto. And few texts have shed so much light on law. international law. and nationalism.

Amid this life based on coercion, one and the same thought constantly emerged among different nations, namely, that in every individual a spiritual element is manifested that gives life to all that exists, and that this spiritual element strives to unite with everything of a like nature to itself, and attains this aim through love.

If, when a man writes a poem or commits a murder, the bodily movements involved in his act result solely from physical causes, it would seem absurd to put up a statue to him in the one case and to hang him in the other.

Philosophy hasn't made any progress?-If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?

The activity of art is... as important as the activity of language itself, and as universal.

I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought.

This mortal Don Quixote died and descended into hell, which he entered lance on rest, and freed all the condemned, as he freed the galley slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down the scroll that Dante saw there and replaced it by one on which was written "Long live hope!" and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing at him, he went to heaven. And God laughed paternally at him, and this divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness.

Is it just I who cannot found a school, or can a philosopher never do so?

Medicine considers the human body as to the means by which it is cured and by which it is driven away from health.

Yet it must be acknowledged that there is a fundamental difference between the sexual impulse in men and women. Her need is for a lover, a protector, a father for her children. His desire is for mastery, conquest, to be allowed to use her body for his own satisfaction. He feels like a bee, burying itself in a flower, apparently doing nothing for the flower but taking its sweetness. If he loves her, then his desire is mixed with a kind of pity.

People must be governed in a manner agreeable to their temper and disposition; and men of free character and spirit must be ruled with, at least, some condescension to this spirit and this character.

I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic, and capitalism because it favors exploitation.

Any one thing in the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence to an humble and grateful mind.

In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it and he sells it before the roof is on. He plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing. He brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops. He embraces a profession and gives it up. He settles in a place which he soon afterward leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics and if at the end of a year of unremitting labour he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.

The time is come when women must do something more than the "domestic hearth," which means nursing the infants, keeping a pretty house, having a good dinner and an entertaining party.

To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.

There is nothing truly real, save that which feels, suffers, pities, loves and desires, save consciousness. And we need God in order to save consciousness; not in order to think existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know the why and how of it, but in order to feel the wherefore of it.

If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned - a saint or a corpse.

There are two ways in which a science develops; in response to problems which is itself creates, and in response to problems that are forced on it from the outside.

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the small space which I fill, or even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified, and wonder that I am here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, or now rather than then. Who has set me here? By whose order and design have this place and time been destined for me? It is not well to be too much at liberty. It is not well to have all we want.How many kingdoms know nothing of us! The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.

To throw oneself into strange teachings is quite dangerous.

People talk, indeed, of a "primitive mentality", as, for example, to-day that of the inferior races, and in days gone by that of humanity in general, at whose door the responsibility for superstition should be laid.

A single part of physics occupies the lives of many men, and often leaves them dying in uncertainty.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.

Rest gives relish to labour.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

"Their own strength has betrayed them. They have [...] pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads."

Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please. Variant translation: Wars are begun at will but not ended at will.

In reality, during the continuance of any one regulated proportion, between the respective values of the different values of the different metals in the coin, the value of the most precious metal regulates the value of the whole coin.

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

When my ability to reason shows me that the suffering of another being is very similar to my own suffering and matters just as much to that other being as my own suffering matters to me, then my reason is showing me something that is undeniably true. ... The perspective on ourselves that we get when we take the point of view of the universe also yields as much objectivity as we need if we are to find a cause that is worthwhile in a way that is independent of our own desires. The most obvious such cause is the reduction of pain and suffering, wherever it is to be found.

For man holds his ground only by surpassing himself, in the same sense in which it is said that one ceases to love if one does not love increasingly everyday.

They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life.

Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

United States! the ages plead, - Present and Past in under-song, - Go put your creed into your deed, Nor speak with double tongue.

It is said that "being" is the most universal and the emptiest concept. As such it resists every attempt at definition. Nor does this most universal and thus indefinable concept need any definition. Everybody uses it constantly and also already understands what is meant by it.

I resolved from the beginning of my quest that I would not be misled by sentiment and desire into beliefs for which there was no good evidence.

I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden.

How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a sense of the whole. I only know that I was the cause of their sin and downfall. Like a vile trichina, like a germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so I contaminated all this earth, so happy and sinless before my coming. They learnt to lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm of falsehood.

Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.

Probably in time physiologists will be able to make nerves connecting the bodies of different people; this will have the advantage that we shall be able to feel another man's tooth aching.