One who is serious all day will never have a good time, while one who is frivolous all day will never establish a household.

Sleep is for the inhabitants of Planets only. In another time, Man will sleep and wake continually at once. The greater part of our Body, of our Humanity itself, yet sleeps a deep sleep.

"...faith and repentance, i. e. believing Jesus to be the Messiah, and a good life, are the indispensable conditions of the new covenant, to be performed by all those who would obtain eternal life. (The reasonableness, or rather necessity of which, that we may the better comprehend, we must a little look back to what was said in the beginning"

Zen Buddhism is inspired by a basic trust in the Here, a basic trust in the world.

There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.

That Marxism should triumph in Russia, where there is no industry, would be the greatest contradiction that Marxism could undergo. But there is no such contradiction, for there is no such triumph. Russia is Marxist more or less as the Germans of the Holy Roman Empire were Romans.

There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons - moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on - no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.

Let us go on committing suicide by working among our people, and let them dream life just as the lake dreams the sky.

If you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. This is the inductive method.

When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result.

Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way. But can there be anything more puerile, more short-sighted, than the views of those Economists who believe in all earnest that this woeful transitory state means nothing but adapting society to the acquisitive propensities of capitalists, both landlords and money-lords?

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.

Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.

There is no practice of nonviolence that does not negotiate fundamental ethical and political ambiguities, which means that "nonviolence" is not an absolute principle, but the name of an ongoing struggle.

Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.

The superior man accords with the course of the Mean. Though he may be all unknown, unregarded by the world, he feels no regret. It is only the sage who is able for this.

Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.

A farewell does not dilute the presence of the past; it may make an even deeper presence.

If there may be doubts for men and for a childless woman as to the way to, fulfil the will of God, for a mother that path is firmly and clearly defined, and if she fulfils it humbly with a simple heart she stands on the highest point of perfection a human being can attain, and becomes for all a model of that complete performance of God's will which all desire. Only a mother can before her death tranquilly say to Him who sent her into this world, and Whom she has served by bearing and bringing up children whom she has loved more than herself - only she having served Him in the way appointed to her can say with tranquillity, Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace. And that is the highest perfection to which, as to the highest good, men aspire.

Hegel ... destroyed the illusion of the subject's being-in-itself and showed that the subject is itself an aspect of social objectivity. ... However, ... we must ask this question: is this objectivity which we have shown to be a necessary condition and which subsumes abstract subjectivity in fact the higher factor? Does it not rather remain precisely what Hegel reproached it with being in his youth, namely pure externality, the coercive collective? Does not the retreat to this supposedly higher authority signify the regression of the subject, which had earlier won its freedom only with the greatest efforts, with infinite pains?

That which is good for the enemy harms you, and that which is good for you harms the enemy.

It cannot be doubted, I think, that Mr. Darwin has satisfactorily proved that what he terms selection, or selective modification, must occur, and does occur, in nature; and he has also proved to superfluity that such selection is competent to produce forms as distinct, structurally, as some genera even are. If the animated world presented us with none but structural differences, I should have no hesitation in saying that Mr. Darwin has demonstrated the existence of a true physical cause, amply competent to account for the origin of living species, and of man among the rest.

Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!

Eat not the brain.

The "hard law of value," the "law set in stone"-when it abandons us, what sadness, what panic! This is why there are still good days left to fascist and authoritarian methods, because they revive something of the violence necessary to life-whether suffered or inflicted. The violence of ritual, the violence of work, the violence of knowledge, the violence of blood, the violence of power and of the political is good! It is clear, luminous, the relations of force, contradictions, exploitation, repression! This is lacking today, and the need for it makes itself felt.

Recognize what is in your sight, and that which is hidden from you will become plain to you. For there is nothing hidden which will not become manifest.

There is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.

A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science.

If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.

In theory there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught; but in life there are many things to draw us aside.

The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.

All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.

The open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence.

The more one presupposes that his own power will suffice him to realize what he desires the more practical is that desire. When I treat a man contemptuously, I can inspire him with no practical desire to appreciate my grounds of truth. When I treat any one as worthless, I can inspire him with no desire to do right.

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

These examples... show that, in whatever proportion of its limbs the Gorilla differs from Man, the other Apes depart still more widely from the Gorilla and that, consequently, such differences of proportion can have no ordinal value.

The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens ... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.

Throw moderation to the winds, and the greatest pleasures bring the greatest pains.

Even atheists rebel and express, like Hardy and Housman, their rage against God although (or because) He does not, on their view, exist...

Strength of body is nobility in beasts of burden, strength of character is nobility in men.

The "old maid" with her repressed cravings for tenderness, sex, and propagation, is rarely quite free of ressentiment. What we call "prudery," in contrast with true modesty, is but one of the numerous variants of sexual ressentiment. The habitual behavior of many old maids, who obsessively ferret out all sexually significant events in their surroundings in order to condemn them harshly, is nothing but sexual gratification transformed into ressentiment satisfaction. Thus the criticism accomplishes the very thing it pretends to condemn.

The world and life are one.

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

Why trouble ye the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me. For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always. For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial. Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her.

There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events, so that it seems imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect. Thus with the Reformation; instead of Protestantism came Lutheranism.

To be a Christian - a follower of Jesus Christ - is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

I believe that the nature of man is a contradiction rooted in the conditions of human existence that requires a search for solutions, which in their turn create new contradictions and now the need for answers. I believe that every answer to these contradictions can really satisfy the condition of helping man to overcome the sense of separation and to achieve a sense of agreement, of unity, and of belonging. I believe that in every answer to these contradictions, man has the possibility of choosing only between going forward or going back; these choices, which are translated into specific actions, are means toward the regressing or toward the progressing of the humanity that is in us.