Jean Paul calls the most important night of his life the one when he discovered there was no difference between dying the next day or in thirty years. A revelation as significant as it is futile; if we occasionally manage to grasp its cogency, we resist on the other hand drawing its consequences, in immediacy the difference in question seeming to each of us somehow irreducible, even absolute: to exist is to prove that we have not understood to what point it is all one and the same thing to die now or no matter when.

No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

When we make ethical judgments, we must go beyond a personal or sectional point of view and take into account the interests of all those affected, unless we have sound ethical grounds for doing otherwise. (...) The essence of the principle of equal consideration of interests is that we give equal weight in our moral deliberations to the like interests of all those affected by our actions. (...) an interest is an interest, whoever's interest it may be.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

When the basic structure of society is publicly known to satisfy its principles for an extended period of time, those subject to these arrangements tend to develop a desire to act in accordance with these principles and to do their part in institutions which exemplify them.

He who has injured thee was either stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare thyself.

Not less strong than the will to truth must be the will to sincerity. Only an age, which can show the courage of sincerity, can possess truth, which works as a spiritual force within it.

Because our time is struggling toward the word with which it may express its spirit, many names come to the fore and all make claim to being the right one. Without our assistance, time will not bring the right word to light; we must all work together on it. If, however, so much depends on us, we may reasonably ask what they have made of us and what they propose to make of us; we ask about the education through which they seek to make us creators of that word. Do they conscientiously cultivate our predisposition to become creators or do they treat us only as creatures whose nature simply permits training? Therefore we are concerned above all with what they make of us in the time of our plasticity; the school question is a life question.

The content or time-clothing of any medium or culture is the preceding medium or culture.

He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

Consider all that you've gone through, all that you've survived. And that the story of your life is done, your assignment complete. How many good things have you seen? How much pain and pleasure have you resisted? How many honors have you declined? How many unkind people have you been kind to?

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.

Long live the king,' cry the loving and the loyal, beside themselves with joy. 'Long live the king,' responds the republican hypocrite in dire terror. What does it matter? There is only one cry. And the king is crowned.

The noblest Digladiation is in the Theatre of ourselves.

An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.

The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth.

The whole contains nothing which is not or its advantage; and all natures indeed have this common principle, but the nature of the universe has this principle besides, that it cannot be compelled even by any external cause to generate anything harmful to itself.

If pains be to be taken to give him a manly air and assurance betimes, it is chiefly as a fence to his virtue when he goes into the world under his own conduct.

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

Government by majorities can be made less oppressive by devolution, by placing the decision of questions primarily affecting only a section of the community in the hands of that section, rather than of a Central Chamber. In this way, men are no longer forced to submit to decisions made in a hurry by people mostly ignorant of the matter in hand and not personally interested.

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.

That the uneducated and the ill-educated should think the hypothesis that all races of beings, man inclusive, may in process of time have been evolved from the simplest monad, a ludicrous one, is not to be wondered at. But for the physiologist, who knows that every individual being is so evolved-who knows, further, that in their earliest condition the germs of all plants and animals whatever are so similar, "that there is no appreciable distinction amongst them, which would enable it to be determined whether a particular molecule is the germ of a Conferva or of an Oak, of a Zoophyte or of a Man";-for him to make a difficulty of the matter is inexcusable.

In an autobiography one must surely be allowed to boast, just for fun. I have, at a range of twenty feet, shot the tobacco out of a cigarette and left the paper intact. At a range of thirty feet, I have split a target, edge towards me, with an air pistol. I am also the world's champion in a game called "You Are the Target," in which anyone better than I would be dead. The game is to shoot an arrow straight up and see how near to you it can be allowed to land. You have to watch its fall very carefully, but I have had it hit the ground exactly between my feet. Of course, there were no witnesses. Had there been, they would forcefully have discouraged the experiment. I was using a fifty-five pound bow.

But our Don Quixote, the inward, the immortal Don Quixote, conscious of his own comicness, does not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire alone to the mountain, fleeing from the king-making crowds, as Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim him king. He left the title of king for the inscription written over the cross.

With rebellion, awareness is born.

We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

Talk of secularism is meaningful when it refers to the weakness of traditional religious belief or the lack of power of churches and other religious bodies. That is what is meant when we say Britain is a more secular country than the United States, and in this sense secularism is an achievable condition. But if it means a type of society in which religion is absent, secularism is a kind of contradiction, for it is defined by what it excludes. Post-Christian secular societies are formed by the beliefs they reject, whereas a society that had truly left Christianity behind would lack the concepts that shaped secular thought.

A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.

The concept of original sin gives us a penetrating insight into human destiny.

But there has also been the rise of populist movements within existing liberal democracies, and particularly within the United States and Britain, which were... the leaders of the neoliberal revolution... in the 1980s...

And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any. 

Today those who peer into the future want only relief from anxiety. Unable to face the prospect that the cycles of war will continue, they are desperate to find a pattern of improvement in history. It is only natural that believers in reason, lacking any deeper faith and too feeble to tolerate doubt, should turn to the sorcery of numbers. Happily there are some who are ready to assist them. Just as the Elizabethan magus transcribed tables shown to him by angels, the modern scientific scryer deciphers numerical auguries of angels hidden in ourselves.

The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.

One cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors. To dwell long upon them is to add to the offense. Repentance and sorrow can only be displaced by something better, which is as free and original as if they had not been.

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations.

You can do everything with bayonets except sit on them. If you want to preserve your power indefinitely you have to get the consent of the ruled. And this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in "Brave new World", and partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious, and his deeper emotions, and his physiology, even, and so making him actually love his slavery. I mean I think this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime. But they will be happy in situations when they oughtn't be happy.

In one sense, I do believe I am "like a man," as Parthe [the writer's sister] says. But how? In having sympathy. ... Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so. ... They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?

Someone arrived there - who lifted the veil of the goddess, at Sais. - But what did he see? He saw - wonder of wonders - himself. Novalis here alludes to Plutarch's account of the shrine of the goddess Minerva, identified with Isis, at Sais, which he reports had the inscription "I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal has hitherto raised."

The exclusive right of legislation and taxation in the representatives of the people.

Burke said with a depth that it is impossible to admire enough that art is man's nature: yes, undoubtedly, man with all his affections, all his knowledge, all his arts, is truly the man of nature, and the weaver's web is as natural as the spider's.

The rottenness of the matter which is the foundation of everything!

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

Here and everywhere is the struggle for existence, life inextricably enmeshed with war. All life living at the expense of life, every organism eating other organisms forever.