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.

Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.

They do not know the penalty of unrighteousness, which is the thing they most ought to know. For it is not what they think it is scourgings and death, which they sometimes escape entirely when they have done wrong but a penalty which it is impossible to escape. Two patterns, my friend, are set up in the world, the divine, which is most blessed, and the godless, which is most wretched, and their silliness and extreme foolishness blind them to the fact that through their unrighteous acts they are made like the one and unlike the other. They therefore pay the penalty for this by living a life that conforms to the pattern they resemble.

When the British came there was, throughout India, a system of communal schools, managed by the village communities. The agents of the East India Company destroyed these village communities, and took steps to replace the schools; even today, after a century of effort to restore them, they stand at only 66% of their number a hundred years ago. Hence, the 93 % illiteracy of India.

Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.

A thing therefore never returns to nothing.

Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debaucher of sentiment?

The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it.

If I understand at all the true Spirit of the present contest, We are engaged in a Civil War ... I consider the Royalists of France, or, as they are (perhaps more properly) called, the Aristocrates, as of the party which we have taken in this civil war.

From a Darwinian point of view, human beliefs are adaptations to our part of the world. No doubt much of what we believe must be roughly accurate, or else we would not have survived. But the beliefs we have evolved might latch on to the world only enough to help us stumble our way through it, and then only for the time being. Human belief-systems could be useful illusions, appearing and disappearing as they prove to be more or less advantageous in the random walk of natural selection. Might not evolution be one of these illusions? Scientific naturalism is the theory that human beliefs are evolutionary adaptations whose survival has nothing to do with their truth. But in that case scientific naturalism is self-defeating, since on its own premises scientific theories cannot be known to be true.

Each new ontological theory, propounded in lieu of previous ones shown to be untenable, has been followed by a new criticism leading to a new scepticism. All possible conceptions have been one by one tried and found wanting; and so the entire field of speculation has been gradually exhausted without positive result: the only result reached being the negative one above stated, that the reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown.

But the chief design of this paper is not to disprove it, which many have sufficiently done; but to entreat Americans to consider.

We are now living in an age of literary exhaustion; we get used to the bleak landscape. Cyril Connolly said that the writer's business is to produce masterpieces; but what masterpieces have been produced in the past fifty years?

Suppose a person entering a house were to feel heat on the porch, and going further, were to feel the heat increasing, the more they penetrated within. Doubtless, such a person would believe there was a fire in the house, even though they did not see the fire that must be causing all this heat. A similar thing will happen to anyone who considers this world in detail: one will observe that all things are arranged according to their degrees of beauty and excellence, and that the nearer they are to God, the more beautiful and better they are.

If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Brahma, st. 1 Composed in July 1856 this poem is derived from a major passage of the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most popular of Hindu scriptures, and portions of it were likely a paraphrase of an existing translation. Though titled "Brahma" its expressions are actually more indicative of the Hindu concept "Brahman"

Any institution is only a political structure. In physics and in morals, the laws are the same; you cannot build a large structure on a narrow foundation, nor a durable structure on a moving or transient base. In the political order, therefore, if one wants to build on a large scale and for the centuries, one must rely on an opinion, on a large and profound belief. For if this opinion does not dominate a majority of minds and if it is not deeply rooted, it will furnish only a narrow and transient base.

A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him. Ch. II; Variants or variant translations of this statement have also been attributed to Bakunin: The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth. A boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.

Men must have rights before they can have equal rights. Each man has a right to use the world because he is here and wants to use the world. The equality of this right is merely a limitation arising from the presence of others with like rights. Society, in other words, does not grant, and cannot equitably withhold from any individual, the right to the use of land. That right exists before society and independently of society, belonging at birth to each individual, and ceasing only with his death. Society itself has no original right to the use of land. What right it has with regard to the use of land is simply that which is derived from and is necessary to the determination of the rights of the individuals who compose it. That is to say, the function of society with regard to the use of land only begins where individual rights clash, and is to secure equality between these clashing rights of individuals.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

The color is of the object and the object in all its qualities is expressed through color. For it is objects that glows- gems and sunlight; and it is objects that are splendid- crowns, robes, sunlight. Except as they express objects, through being the significant color-quality of materials of ordinary experience, colors effect only transient excitations.

The Law teaches that the universe was invented and created by God, and that it did not come into being by chance or by itself.

Thus, all unknown quantities can be expressed in terms of a single quantity, whenever the problem can be constructed by means of circles and straight lines, or by conic sections, or even by some other curve of degree not greater than the third or fourth.But I shall not stop to explain this in more detail, because I should deprive you of the pleasure of mastering it yourself, as well as of the advantage of training your mind by working over it, which is in my opinion the principal benefit to be derived from this science. Because, I find nothing here so difficult that it cannot be worked out by anyone at all familiar with ordinary geometry and with algebra, who will consider carefully all that is set forth in this treatise.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

Have ye not read what David did, when he was an hungred, and they that were with him; How he entered into the house of God, and did eat the shewbread, which was not lawful for him to eat, neither for them which were with him, but only for the priests? Or have ye not read in the law, how that on the sabbath days the priests in the temple profane the sabbath, and are blameless? But I say unto you, That in this place is one greater than the temple. But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless.

Society creates the victims that it afterwards vainly attempts to get rid of.

One common strategy on which we should all be able to agree is to take steps to reduce the risk of human extinction when those steps are also highly effective in benefiting existing sentient beings. For example, eliminating or decreasing the consumption of animal products will benefit animals, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and lessen the chances of a pandemic resulting from a virus evolving among the animals crowded into today's factory farms, which are an ideal breeding ground for viruses. That therefore looks like a high-priority strategy.

A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you're in the same room with him, you know it.

Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world.

I ask myself; Why is it that only some people suffer? Why are only some selected from the ranks of normal people and put on the torture rack? Some religions maintain that God is trying us through suffering, or that we expiate evil and unbelief through it. If such an explanation can satisfy the religious man, it is not sufficient for anyone who notices that suffering is arbitrary and unjust, because the innocent often suffer most. There is no valid justification for suffering. Suffering has no hierarchy of values.

Well, I've worried some about, you know, why write books ... why are we teaching people to write books when presidents and senators do not read them, and generals do not read them. And it's been the university experience that taught me that there is a very good reason, that you catch people before they become generals and presidents and so forth and you poison their minds with ... humanity, and however you want to poison their minds, it's presumably to encourage them to make a better world.

Or, if you enjoy living with Greeks also, spend your time with Socrates and with Zeno: the former will show you how to die if it be necessary; the latter how to die before it is necessary. Live with Chrysippus, with Posidonius: they will make you acquainted with things earthly and things heavenly; they will bid you work hard over something more than neat turns of language and phrases mouthed forth for the entertainment of listeners; they will bid you be stout of heart and rise superior to threats. The only harbour safe from the seething storms of this life is scorn of the future, a firm stand, a readiness to receive Fortune's missiles full in the breast, neither skulking nor turning the back.

I disbelieve in specialization and... experts. ...[P]aying too much respect to the specialist ...[is] destroying the commonwealth of learning, the rationalist tradition, and science ...

Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end.

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.

A whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end.

A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fire and light; of wild worth, all uncultured; working out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there.

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

There is no problem in all mathematics that cannot be solved by direct counting. But with the present implements of mathematics many operations can be performed in a few minutes which without mathematical methods would take a lifetime.

Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.

He and his tyrannicide! I am in a mad fury about these explosions. If that is the new world! Damn O'Donovan Rossa; damn him behind and before, above, below, and roundabout; damn, deracinate, and destroy him, root and branch, self and company, world without end. Amen. I write that for sport if you like, but I will pray in earnest, O Lord, if you cannot convert, kindly delete him!

The moral things I wish to say to future generations is very simple. I should say love is wise hatred is foolish. In this world which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way, and if we are to live together and not die together we must learn the kind of charity and kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.

It is ...easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.

Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word Liberty entire nations.

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonable says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not a man's power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second.