We vainly accuse the fury of guns, and the new inventions of death; it is in the power of every hand to destroy us, and we are beholden unto every one we meet he doth not kill us.

When we hear news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

If someone asked us 'but is that true?' we might say "yes" to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say "I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same."

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not.

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.

I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. This is the first thing to get clear in talking about miracles.

I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.

For Warre, consisteth not in Battell onely, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of Time, is to be considered in the nature of Warre; as it is in the nature of Weather.

Science raises itself above all Ages and all Times, embracing and apprehending the ONE UNCHANGING TIME as the higher source of all Ages and Epochs, and grasping that vast idea in its free, unbounded comprehension.

The infinity of All ever bringing forth anew, and even as infinite space is around us, so is infinite potentiality, capacity, reception, malleability, matter.

Don't let your hearts grow numb. Stay alert. It is your soul which matters.

With other beliefs crumbling, many seek to return to what they piously describe as "Enlightenment values". But these values were not as unambiguously benign as is nowadays commonly supposed.

The one is ready even to sacrifice itself for the good of others, the other to plunge into peril provided it drags others with it.

A sovereign shows himself to be a tyrant if he disregards his honest advisors, or punishes them for what they have said.

The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for experimental exploration - the technique of the suspended judgement.

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life.

The student of mathematics often finds it hard to throw off the uncomfortable feeling that his science, in the person of his pencil, surpasses him in intelligence,-an impression which the great Euler confessed he often could not get rid of. This feeling finds a sort of justification when we reflect that the majority of the ideas we deal with were conceived by others, often centuries ago. In a great measure it is really the intelligence of other people that confronts us in science.

The will to the "true world" in the sense of Plato and Christianity ... is in truth a no-saying to our present world, precisely the one in which art is at home.

You are not free. Myriad invisible hands hold your hands and direct them. When you rise in anger, a great-grandfather froths at your mouth; when you make love, an ancestral caveman growls with lust; when you sleep, tombs open in your memory till your skull brims with ghosts.

When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.

Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure-Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure.Such pleasures seek if private be thy end:If it be public, wide let them extend.Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view:If pains must come, let them extend to few.

I am the center of my universe, the center of the universe, and in my supreme anguish I cry with Michelet, "Mon moi, ils m'arrachent mon moi!" What is a man profited if he shall gain the world and lose his own soul? (Matt. xvi. 26).

Never acknowledge the limitations of man. Smash all boundaries! Deny whatever your eyes see. Die every moment, but say: "Death does not exist."

We should be considerate to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

Reason does not exist for the sake of life, but life for the sake of reason. An existence which does not of itself satisfy reason and solve all her doubts, cannot be the true one.

I'm not clever enough to be a physicist. When asked about why he chose to become a biologist.

You can do everything with bayonets except sit on them. If you want to preserve your power indefinitely you have to get the consent of the ruled. And this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in "Brave new World", and partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious, and his deeper emotions, and his physiology, even, and so making him actually love his slavery. I mean I think this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime. But they will be happy in situations when they oughtn't be happy.

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. ... We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

I do not say this, that I think there should be no difference of opinions in conversation, nor opposition in men's discourses... 'Tis not the owning one's dissent from another, that I speak against, but the manner of doing it.

Why don't I commit suicide? Because I am as sick of death as I am of life.

When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.

Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.

If nonviolence is to make sense as an ethical and political position, it cannot simply repress aggression or do away with its reality; rather, nonviolence emerges as a meaningful concept precisely when destruction is most likely or seems most certain.

Whom Fortune wishes to destroy she first makes mad.

Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.

We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.

Pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

If someone were to expound that godliness is to belong to childhood in the temporal sense and thus dwindle and die with the years as childhood does, is to be a happy frame of mind that cannot be preserved but only recollected; if someone were to expound that repentance as a weakness of old age accompanies the decline of one's powers, when the senses are dulled, when sleep no longer strengthens but increases lethargy-this would be ungodliness and foolishness.

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 way in which the vast mass of the poor are treated by modern society is truly scandalous. They are herded into great cities where they breathe a fouler air than in the countryside which they have left.

Political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically and practically in the ability to distinguish friend and enemy. The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.

Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.

The similarity between Christ and Socrates consists essentially in their dissimilarity. Just as philosophy begins with doubt, so also a life that may be called human begins with irony.

Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.

The husband who decides to surprise his wife is often very much surprised himself.