The men of England - the men, I mean of light and leading in England.

But if we discard this definition of a people, and, assuming another, say that a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love, then, in order to discover the character of any people, we have only to observe what they love. Yet whatever it loves, if only it is an assemblage of reasonable beings and not of beasts, and is bound together by an agreement as to the objects of love, it is reasonably called a people; and it will be a superior people in proportion as it is bound together by higher interests, inferior in proportion as it is bound together by lower.

Information has no scent.

The Being of the universe, at first hidden and concealed, has no power which can offer resistance to the search for knowledge ; it has to lay itself open before the seeker - to set before his eyes and give for his enjoyment, its riches and its depths.

Nobody should ever doubt that in the washing of rebirth (Titus 3:5) absolutely all sins, from the least to the greatest, are altogether forgiven.

Wonderful is the depth of Thy oracles, whose surface is before us, inviting the little ones; and yet wonderful is the depth, O my God, wonderful is the depth. It is awe to look into it; and awe of honour, and a tremor of love. The enemies thereof I hate vehemently. Oh, if Thou wouldest slay them with Thy two-edged sword, that they be not its enemies! For thus do I love, that they should be slain unto themselves that they may live unto Thee.

Of faith and morals, one cannot speak honestly for long without hurting feelings. Therefore, most people speak dishonestly of the most important subjects. Many recent philosophers prefer not to speak of them at all. But in some situations honesty is incompatible with silence.

Even purely intellectual progress brings about its revenges. Problems settled in a rough and ready way by rude men, absorbed in action, demand renewed attention and show themselves to be still unread riddles when men have time to think. The beneficent demon, doubt, whose name is Legion and who dwells amongst the tombs of old faiths, enters into mankind and thenceforth refuses to be cast out. Sacred customs, venerable dooms of ancestral wisdom, hallowed by tradition and professing to hold good for all time, are put to the question. Cultured reflection asks for their credentials; judges them by its own standards; finally, gathers those of which it approves into ethical systems, in which the reasoning is rarely much more than a decent pretext for the adoption of foregone conclusions.

When it comes to consideration of how to do well in running the city, which must proceed entirely through justice and soundness of mind.

That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

Probably, the most-often-repeated lesson in history is that foreigners who are called in to help one side in a civil war take over for themselves. It is a lesson that seems never to be learned despite endless repetition.

At one level, this movement on behalf of oppressed farm animals is emotional...Yet the movement is also the product of a deep intellectual ferment pioneered by the Princeton scholar Peter Singer...This idea popularized by Professor Singer - that we have ethical obligations that transcend our species - is one whose time appears to have come...What we're seeing now is an interesting moral moment: a grass-roots effort by members of one species to promote the welfare of others...animal rights are now firmly on the mainstream ethical agenda.

In anger we should refrain both from speech and action.

The value of money is in proportion to the quantity of the necessaries of life which it will purchase.

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

In reality, the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole but only in that aspect of it which is important for us, the rest being intentionally or from necessity omitted.

If I was not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. ... I cannot tell if I would have done any creative work of importance in music, but I do know that I get most joy in life out of my violin.

The more ideas have become automatic, instrumentalized, the less does anybody see in them thoughts with a meaning of their own. They are considered things, machines. Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society.

Of all things nothing exists that is not by its substance the offspring of ocean. But why will you have me tell this to the vulgar? Although better to have been shrouded in silence, it nevertheless has been spoken; at all events I declare it, although all men will not readily receive the same.

The earth with yellow pears And overgrown with roses wild Upon the pond is bent, And swans divine, With kisses drunk You drop your heads In the sublimely sobering water. But where, with winter come, am I To find, alas, the floweres, and where The sunshine And the shadow of the world? Cold the walls stand And the wordless, in the wind The weathercocks are rattling.

The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos. If it has an aesthetic fault, it is perhaps, for us who have known romanticism, a shade too ordered. For all its vast spaces it might in the end afflict us with a kind of claustrophobia. Is there nowhere any vagueness? No undiscovered by-ways? No twilight? Can we never really get out of doors?

I know every numbskull will babble on about "black man," "maneater," "chance," and "retrospective interpretation," in order to banish something terribly inconvenient that might sully the familiar picture of childhood innocence. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded. On a phallic dream he had as a young child.

Nothing exists! Neither life nor death. I watch mind and matter hunting each other like two nonexistent erotic phantasms - merging, begetting, disappearing - and I say: "This is what I want!" I know now: I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything, I have freed myself from both the mind and the heart, I have mounted much higher, I am free. This is what I want. I want nothing more. I have been seeking freedom.

Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.

The circumstances of justice may be described as the normal conditions under which human cooperation is both possible and necessary.

Not far from the invention of fire... we must rank the invention of doubt.

If you believe in the future life and, instead of preparing for it, sell it in order to buy this world, then that is folly! You do not normally sell two things for one; how can you give up an endless life for a limited number of days.

We often attribute "understanding" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

We are all made for mutual assistance, as the feet, the hands, and the eyelids, as the rows of the upper and under teeth, from whence it follows that clashing and opposition is perfectly unnatural.

Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.

Architecture worth great attention. As we double our numbers every 20 years we must double our houses. Besides we build of such perishable materials that one half of our houses must be rebuilt in every space of 20 years. So that in that term, houses are to be built for three fourths of our inhabitants. It is then among the most important arts: and it is desireable to introduce taste into an art which shews so much.

The Mass is the greatest blasphemy of God, and the highest idolatry upon earth, an abomination the like of which has never been in Christendom since the time of the Apostles.

The Apostle says: I make up in my flesh what is lacking to the sufferings of Christ (Col. 1:24). I make up, he tells us, not what is lacking to my sufferings, but what is lacking to the sufferings of Christ; not in Christ flesh, but in mine. not in Christ's flesh, but in mine. Christ is still suffering, not in His own flesh which He took with Him into heaven, but in my flesh, which is still suffering on earth.

The most remarkable piece of reading that you may be recommended to take and try if you can study is a book by Goethe-one of his last books, which he wrote when he was an old man, about seventy years of age-I think one of the most beautiful he ever wrote, full of mild wisdom, and which is found to be very touching by those who have eyes to discern and hearts to feel it. It is one of the pieces in "Wilhelm Meister's Travels." I read it through many years ago; and, of course, I had to read into it very hard when I was translating it (applause), and it has always dwelt in my mind as about the most remarkable bit of writing that I have known to be executed in these late centuries. I have often said, there are ten pages of that which, if ambition had been my only rule, I would rather have written than have written all the books that have appeared since I came into the world.

In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as if it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasoning grasps at straws for premises and floats on gossamer for deductions.

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin.

Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities - his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.

See now the power of truth; the same experiment which at first glance seemed to show one thing, when more carefully examined, assures us of the contrary.

If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever.... Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.

Antagoras the poet was boiling a conger, and Antigonus, coming behind him as he was stirring his skillet, said, "Do you think, Antagoras, that Homer boiled congers when he wrote the deeds of Agamemnon?" Antagoras replied, "Do you think, O king, that Agamemnon, when he did such exploits, was a peeping in his army to see who boiled congers?"

There is nothing more visible than what is secret, and nothing more manifest than what is minute. Therefore the superior man is watchful over himself, when he is alone.

Of all people, girls and servants are the most difficult to behave to. If you are familiar with them, they lose their humility. If you maintain a reserve towards them, they are discontented.

There are cultures that can only picture their origins and not their ends. Some are obsessed by both. Two other positions are possible: only picturing one's end - our own culture; picturing neither beginning nor end - the coming culture.

You must do nothing before him, which you would not have him imitate. If any thing escape you, which you would have pass as a fault in him, he will be sure to shelter himself under your example, and shelter himself so as that it will not be easy to come at him, to correct it in him the right way.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.