A young delicate tree, that is being clipped and cut by the gardener in order to give it an artificial form, will never reach the majestic height and the beauty as when allowed to grow in nature and freedom.

All human activities are equivalent ... and ... all are on principle doomed to failure.

When one told Plistarchus that a notorious railer spoke well of him, "I 'll lay my life," said he, "somebody hath told him I am dead, for he can speak well of no man living."

We know as little of a supreme being as of Matter. But there is as little doubt of the existence of a supreme being as of Matter. The world beyond is reality, and experiential fact. We only don't understand it.

One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! Ch. 4 Variant: It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion, a stupid delusion.

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

Warmth, warmth, more warmth! for we are dying of cold and not of darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost.

There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.

The science of religion is one science within philosophy; indeed it is the final one. In that respect it presupposes the other philosophical disciplines and is therefore a result.

I have just discovered that without her father's consent this sweet, trusting, gullible six-year-old is being sent, for weekly instruction, to a Roman Catholic nun. What chance has she?

Fortunate is he who has acquired a wealth of divine understanding, but wretched the one whose interest lies in shadowy conjectures about divinities.

We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?

"War," says Machiavel, "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans." A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.

By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. A man who himself does not believe what he tells another ... has even less worth than if he were a mere thing. ... makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself.

Ressentiment must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where approximately equal rights (political and otherwise) or formal social equality, publicly recognized, go hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property, and education.

It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others.

The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

Mysticism: to dwell on the unseen, to withdraw ourselves from the things of sense into communion with God - to endeavour to partake of the Divine nature; that is, of Holiness. When we ask ourselves only what is right, or what is the will of God (the same question), then we may truly be said to live in His light.

In this consists the difference between the character of a miser and that of a person of exact economy and assiduity. The one is anxious about small matters for their own sake; the other attends to them only in consequence of the scheme of life which he has laid down to himself.

But now we come to the real paradox: that something as explosive as sexual excitement can nevertheless become a matter of habit, But then that applies to all our pleasures. We discover some new product in the supermarket, and become addicted to it. Then our tastebuds become accustomed to its flavour, and or interest fades. In the same way a honeymoon couple may find an excuse to hurry off to the bedroom half a dozen times a day; but after a month or so sex has taken its place among the many routines of their lives. They still enjoy it, but it no longer has quite the same power to excite the imagination. Sex, like every other pleasure, can become mechanical.

Belief in God and a future life makes it possible to go through life with less of stoic courage than is needed by skeptics. A great many young people lose faith in these dogmas at an age at which despair is easy, and thus have to face a much more intense unhappiness than that which falls to the lot of those who have never had a religious upbringing. Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage. The craving for religious faith being largely an outcome of fear, the advocates of faith tend to think that certain kinds of fear are not to be deprecated. In this, to my mind, they are gravely mistaken. To allow oneself to entertain pleasant beliefs as a means of avoiding fear is not to live in the best way. In so far as religion makes its appeal to fear, it is lowering to human dignity.

To suffer is to produce knowledge.

Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.

Aims, principles, &c., have a place in our thoughts, in our subjective design only; but not yet in the sphere of reality. That which exists for itself only, is a possibility, a potentiality; but has not yet emerged into Existence. A second element must be introduced in order to produce actuality - viz. actuation, realization; and whose motive power is the Will - the activity of man in the widest sense.

Man is always something more than what he knows of himself. He is not what he is simply once and for all, but is a process...

Asked where he came from, he said, "I am a citizen of the world."

Statues are not about history. We don't memorialize each piece of history. We memorialize things that we want to value and things that we want our children to walk by and say "This person embodied the values that I care about." Therefore, statues are about values not about history.

There is no body but eats and drinks. But they are few who can distinguish flavors.

Morality is the beauty of Philosophy.

Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things - old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?

One feature of our own society that seems decidedly anomalous is the matter of sexual advertisement. As we have seen, it is strongly to be expected on evolutionary grounds that, where the sexes differ, it should be the males that advertise and the females that are drab. Modern western man is undoubtedly exceptional in this respect. It is of course true that some men dress flamboyantly and some women dress drably but, on average, there can be no doubt that in our society the equivalent of the peacock's tail is exhibited by the female, not by the male. Women paint their faces and glue on false eyelashes. Apart from special cases, like actors, men do not. Ch. 9. Battle of the Sexes

However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.

Since in the Middle Ages the psychic relation to woman was expressed in the collective worship of Mary, the image of woman lost a value to which human beings had a natural right. This value could find its natural expression only through individual choice, and it sank into the unconscious when the individual form of expression was replaced by a collective one. In the unconscious the image of woman received an energy charge that activated the archaic and infantile dominants. And since all unconscious contents, when activated by dissociated libido, are projected upon the external object, the devaluation of the real woman was compensated by daemonic features. She no longer appeared as an object of love, but as a persecutor or witch. The consequence of increasing Mariolatry was the witch hunt, that indelible blot on the later Middle Ages.

Not official revolutionary commissars in any sort of sashes, but rather revolutionary propagandists are to be dispatched into all the provinces and communes and particularly among the peasants who cannot be revolutionised by principles, nor by the decrees of any dictatorship, but only by the act of revolution itself, that is to say, by the consequences that will inevitably ensure in every commune from complete cessation of the legal and official existence of the state.

At fifteen my heart was set on learning; at thirty I stood firm; at forty I had no more doubts; at fifty I knew the will of heaven; at sixty my ear was obedient; at seventy I could follow my heart's desire without overstepping the boundaries of what was right.

Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well-rounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of production in its entirety.

The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.

Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society.

In the deep discovery of the Subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfy some enquirers.

When one asked him what boys should learn, "That," said he, "which they shall use when men."

A life devoted to science is therefore a happy life, and its happiness is derived from the very best sources that are open to dwellers on this troubled and passionate planet.

Marx explains the alienation of labor as exemplified in, first, the relation of the worker to the product of his labor and, second, the relation of the worker to his own activity. P. 276

In the philosophy of Mach a world without matter is unthinkable. Matter in Mach's philosophy is not merely required as a test body to display properties of something already there ...it is an essential feature in causing those properties which it able to display, Inertia, for example, would not appear by the insertion of one test body in the world; in some way the presence of other matter is a necessary condition. It will be seen how welcome to such a philosophy is the theory that space and the inertial frame come into being with matter, and grow as it grows.

A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.

We must plow through the whole of language.

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat,' than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.