What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed...

The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.

It is the property of every Hero, in every time, in every place and situation, that he come back to reality; that he stand upon things, and not shows of things. According as he loves, and venerates, articulately or with deep speechless thought, the awful realities of things, so will the hollow shows of things, however regular, decorous, accredited by Koreishes or Conclaves, be intolerable and detestable to him.

Everyone knows what made Berkeley notorious. He said that there were no material objects. He said the external world was in some sense immaterial, that nothing existed save ideas - ideas and their authors. His contemporaries thought him very ingenious and a little mad.

When I, who conduct this inquiry, love something, then three things are found: I, what I love, and the love itself. There are, therefore three things: the lover, the beloved and the love.

Music directly represents the passion of the soul. If one listens to the wrong kind of music, he will become the wrong kind of person.

The book of the world, so richly studied by autodidacts, is being closed by the "learned," who are raising walls of opinions to shut the world out.

One is ashamed to say how little is needed for all men to be delivered from those calamities which now oppress them; it is only needful not to lie.

To one who asked what was the proper time for lunch, he said, "If a rich man, when you will; if a poor man, when you can."

I believe that every human being with a physically normal brain can learn a great deal and can be surprisingly intellectual. I believe that what we badly need is social approval of learning and social rewards for learning.We can all be members of the intellectual elite and then, and only then, will a phrase like "America's right to know" and, indeed, any true concept of democracy, have any meaning.

That most knowing of persons - gossip.

In Matthew 12:23 Christ says: "Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree bad and its fruit bad," as if to say: "Let the one who wishes to have good fruit begin by planting a good tree." Therefore, let the person who wishes to do good works being not with the works but with the believing, for this alone makes a person good.

If I knew of something that could serve my nation but would ruin another, I would not propose it to my prince, for I am first a man and only then a Frenchman, because I am necessarily a man, and only accidentally am I French.

For we are social beings, who can exist and behave as autonomous agents only because we are supported in our ventures by that feeling of primal safety that the bond of society brings. We can envisage no project and no satisfaction on which the eyes of others do not shine. We are joined to those others, and even when they are strangers to us, they are also part of us. It is the indispensable need for membership that brings the national idea to our minds; and there is no rational argument that will expel it, once it is there. Without it, we are homeless; and even if our attitude to home is one of sour disaffection, home is no less necessary to our sense of who we are.

Personally, people know themselves very poorly.

Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!'

How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.

Bad company will lead a man to the gallows!

It makes unavoidably necessary an entirely new organization of society in which production is no longer directed by mutually competing individual industrialists but rather by the whole society operating according to a definite plan and taking account of the needs of all.

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.

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.

Leaving virtue without proper cultivation; not thoroughly discussing what is learned; not being able to move towards righteousness of which a knowledge is gained; and not being able to change what is not good: these are the things which occasion me solicitude.

It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.

Life is a System of Vital Forces ; and the conception of such Forces involves a peculiar Fundamental Idea.

We have an enemy, to whose virtues we can owe nothing; but on this occasion we are infinitely obliged to one of his vices. We owe more to his insolence than to our own precaution.

The question of "unreality," which confronts us at this point, is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction.

My hearers, this discourse has not wandered out into the world to look for conflict, it has not tried to get the better of anybody, it has not even tried to uphold anybody, as though there was battle without. It has spoken to you; not by way of explaining anything to you, but trying to speak secretly with you about your relationship to that secret wisdom mentioned in our text. Oh that nothing may upset you in respect to this, “neither life nor death nor things present nor things to come nor any other creature” (Romans 8:38) –not this discourse, which, though it may have profited you nothing, yet has striven for what after all is the first and the last, to help you have what the Scripture calls “faith in yourself before God.

The fundamental political question is why do people obey a government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves, to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from servitude comes not from violent action, but from the refusal to serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support.

...it won't just be the quality and quantity of consciousness in the world that will be transformed in the post-Darwinian Transition. As (post-)humanity emerges from the neurochemical Dark Ages, enriched dopaminergic function in particular may sharpen the sheer intensity and meaningfulness of every moment of conscious existence. For a generation whose lifetimes span both modes of awareness, it will be as if they had just woken up. They will feel they had hitherto been sleep-walking through life in a twilit stupor. Thereafter their former mundane and minimal existence may be recalled only as some kind of zombified trance-state whose nature they were physiologically incapable of recognising...

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.

If any one will piously and soberly consider the sermon which our Lord Jesus spoke on the mount, as we read it in the Gospel according to Matthew, I think that he will find in it, so far as regards the highest morals, a perfect standard of the Christian life: and this we do not rashly venture to promise, but gather it from the very words of the Lord Himself. For the sermon itself is brought to a close in such a way, that it is clear there are in it all the precepts which go to mould the life. He has sufficiently indicated, as I think, that these sayings which He uttered on the mount so perfectly guide the life of those who may be willing to live according to them, that they may justly be compared to one building upon a rock.

The sciences that are expressed by numbers or by other small signs, are easily learned; and... this facility rather than its demonstrability is what has made the fortune of algebra.

It is time to be old, To take in sail: - The god of bounds, Who sets to seas a shore, Came to me in his fatal rounds, And said: 'No more!

Boasting, like gilded armour, is very different inside from outside.

First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...

Dadaism and surrealism ... represented the intoxication of total license, the intoxication in which the mind wallows when it has made a clean sweep of value and surrendered to the immediate. The good is the pole towards which the human spirit is necessarily oriented, not only in action but in every effort, including the effort of pure intelligence. The surrealists have set up non-oriented thought as a model; they have chosen the total absence of value as their supreme value. Men have always been intoxicated by license, which is why, throughout history, towns have been sacked. But there has not always been a literary equivalent for the sacking of towns. Surrealism is such an equivalent.

If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.

By now it may be clear that the position I'm developing is a sort of post-Darwinian Kantianism.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Shall we say, for example, that Science and Art are indebted principally to the founders of Schools and Universities? Did not Science originate rather, and gain advancement, in the obscure closets of the Roger Bacons, Keplers, Newtons; in the workshops of the Fausts and the Watts; wherever, and in what guise soever Nature, from the first times downwards, had sent a gifted spirit upon the earth? Again, were Homer and Shakspeare members of any beneficed guild, or made Poets by means of it? Were Painting and Sculpture created by forethought, brought into the world by institutions for that end? No; Science and Art have, from first to last, been the free gift of Nature; an unsolicited, unexpected gift; often even a fatal one.

I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

The phaenomena afforded by trades, are a part of the history of nature, and therefore may both challenge the naturalist's curiosity and add to his knowledge, Nor will it suffice to justify learned men in the neglect and contempt of this part of natural history, that the men, from whom it must be learned, are illiterate mechanicks... is indeed childish, and too unworthy of a philosopher, to be worthy of an honest answer.