Within the last fifty years, the extraordinary growth of every department of physical science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems imminent.

The measure of a man is a man. Justice, morality, ethics, fairness, goodness all based on the preservation of life. You can do other things, but you'd be Good by coincidence.

If a man has reported to you, that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make any defense (answer) to what has been told you: but reply, The man did not know the rest of my faults, for he would not have mentioned these only.

Many words befall men, mean and noble alike; do not be astonished by them, nor allow yourself to be constrained. If a lie is told, bear with it gently. But whatever I tell you, let it be done completely. Let no one persuade you by word or deed to do or say whatever is not best for you.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy.

There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity - the law of nature, and of nations.

Born for success he seemed, With grace to win, with heart to hold, With shining gifts that took all eyes.

True anarchy is the generative element of religion. Out of the annihilation of all existing institutions she raises her glorious head, as the new foundress of the world.

One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.

There were two brothers called Both and Either; perceiving Either was a good, understanding, busy fellow, and Both a silly fellow and good for little, Philip said, "Either is both, and Both is neither."

It is better; heavier, crueler. The mouth you wear for hell.

All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination. It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!

Never self-possessed, or prudent, love is all abandonment.

You, your families, your friends and your countries are to be exterminated by the common decision of a few brutal but powerful men. To please these men, all the private affections, all the public hopes, all that has been achieved in art, and knowledge and thought and all that might be achieved hereafter is to be wiped out forever. Our ruined lifeless planet will continue for countless ages to circle aimlessly round the sun unredeemed by the joys and loves, the occasional wisdom and the power to create beauty which have given value to human life.

He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.

Ideas are cheap. It's only what you do with them that counts.

How did this division of the nations come about, what was its basis? The division is in accordance with all the previous history of the nationalities in question. It is the beginning of the decision on the life or death of all these nations, large and small. All the earlier history of Austria up to the present day is proof of this and 1848 confirmed it. Among all the large and small nations of Austria, only three standard-bearers of progress took an active part in history, and still retain their vitality - the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary. All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. (Weltsturm). For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary.

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

Nothing made a happy slave, but a degraded man. In proportion as the mind grew callous to its degradation, and all sense of manly pride was lost, the slave felt comfort. In fact, he was no longer a man. If he were to define a man, he would say with Shakspeare,"Man is a being, holding large discourse,Looking before and after."A slave was incapable of either looking before or after.

The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.

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

Since sounds have no natural connection with our ideas ... the doubtfulness and uncertainty of their signification ... has its cause more in the ideas they stand for than in any incapacity there is in one sound more than another to signify any idea.

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free.

To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.

Earth proudly wears the Parthenon As the best gem upon her zone.

[I]t would be a piece of ingenuousness to accuse the man of to-day of his lack of moral code. The accusation would leave him cold, or rather, would flatter him. Immoralism has become a commonplace, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it.

books are only what we want them to be; rather, what we read into them.

Poets and priests were one in the beginning, and they only separated in later times. But the real poet is always a priest, just as the real priest always remains a poet.

Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?

Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.

There cannot any one moral Rule be propos'd, whereof a Man may not justly demand a Reason.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

Older cliches are retrieved both as inherent principles that inform the new ground and new awareness, and as archetypal nostalgia figures with transformed meaning in relation to the new ground.

The Philology of Christianity. How little Christianity cultivates the sense of honesty can be inferred from the character of the writings of its learned men. They set out their conjectures as audaciously as if they were dogmas, and are but seldom at a disadvantage in regard to the interpretation of Scripture. Their continual cry is: am right, for it is written and then follows an explanation so shameless and capricious that a philologist, when he hears it, must stand stock-still between anger and laughter, asking himself again and again: Is it possible? Is it honest? Is it even decent?It is only those who never or always attend church that underestimate the dishonesty with which this subject is still dealt in Protestant pulpits; in what a clumsy fashion the preacher takes advantage of his security from interruption; how the Bible is pinched and squeezed; and how the people are made acquainted with every form of the art of false reading.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.

Let no man be ashamed to speak what he is not ashamed to think.

Don't judge the future of a person based on his present conditions, because time has the power to change black coal to shiny diamond.

I do not mean to deny the biologic, physiologic, or psychologic factors in creating crime; but there is hardly an advanced criminologist who will not concede that the social and economic influences are the most relentless, the most poisonous germs of crime.

I had hoped that out of so many stories you would at least have produced one or two, which could hardly be questioned, and which would clearly show that ghosts or spectres exist. The case you relate... seems to me laughable. In like manner it would be tedious here to examine all the stories of people, who have written on these trifles. To be brief, I cite the instance of Julius Caesar, who, as Suetonius testifies, laughed at such things and yet was happy. ...And so should all who reflect on the human imagination, and the effects of the emotions, laugh at such notions; whatever Lavater and others, who have gone dreaming with him in the matter, may produce to the contrary.

There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.

The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.

When communist workmen associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need - the need for society - and what appears as a means becomes an end. You can observe this practical processing its most splendid results whenever you see French socialist workers together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring together. Company, association, and conversation, which again has society as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is on mere phase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.

The reason a man lives under any particular government is partly a necessity; he cannot easily avoid living under some government, and it is often scarcely in his power to abandon the country in which he was born: it is also partly, a choice of evil; no man can be said, in this case, to enjoy that freedom which is essential to the forming a contract unless it could be shown that he had a power of instituting, somewhere, a government adapted to his own conceptions.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

No one has the right to obey.

Whenever our neighbour's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.