Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive.

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

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

The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking. ... An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility.

Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.

All vices sink into our whole being, if we do not crush them before they gain a footing; and in like manner these sad, pitiable, and discordant feelings end by feeding upon their own bitterness, until the unhappy mind takes a sort of morbid delight in grief... In like manner, wounds heal easily when the blood is fresh upon them: they can then be cleared out and brought to the surface, and admit of being probed by the finger: when disease has turned them into malignant ulcers, their cure is more difficult.

No difference of rank, position, or birth, is so great as the gulf that separates the countless millions who use their head only in the service of their belly, in other words, look upon it as an instrument of the will, and those very few and rare persons who have the courage to say: No! my head is too good for that; it shall be active only in its own service; it shall try to comprehend the wondrous and varied spectacle of this world and then reproduce it in some form, whether as art or as literature, that may answer to my character as an individual.

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

By doing nothing men learn to do ill.

Out of special hatred for our faith, the devil has sent some whores here to destroy our poor young men . . . such a syphilitic whore can poison ten, twenty, thirty or more of the children of good people, and thus is to be considered a murderer, or worse, as a poisoner.

So rolling time changes the seasons of things. What was of value, becomes in turn of no worth.

What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress.

If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.

"...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"

Whoever shall find the interpretation of these words shall not taste of death. (1) I have not a devil; but I honour my Father, and ye do dishonour me. And I seek not mine own glory: there is one that seeketh and judgeth. Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death.

When you close your doors, and make darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not alone; nay, God is within, and your genius is within. And what need have they of light to see what you are doing?

The advantage of pure, and the disadvantage of impure air are experienced each time we breathe, and all who understand the causes of disease know that an impure atmosphere is most unfavourable to the enjoyment of health, and an efficient cause to shorten human existence within the natural life of man. It is therefore most desirable that decisive measures should be devised and generally adopted to ensure to all a pure atmosphere, in which to live during their lives.

The principles of Western liberalism seem no longer to lend themselves to effective action. Deprived of the expressive power, we are awed by it, have a hunger for it, and are afraid of it. Thus we praise the gray dignity of our soft-spoken leaders, but in our hearts we are suckers for passionate outbursts, even when those passionate outbursts are hypocritical and falsely motivated.

We do not have a complete and satisfying knowledge of the world. We are reduced to the simple conclusion that everywhere in the world there is life like ourselves and that all life is shrouded in mystery. A true acquaintance with the world consists in being filled with a sense of the mystery of existence and life. This mystery becomes only more mysterious with every advance in scientific research. To be filled with the mystery of life is like that which is called in the language of mysticism the "wise ignorance," an ignorance which is nonetheless knowledge of the essential.

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.

There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. ... They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

Children should not be suffer'd to lose the consideration of human nature in the shufflings of outward conditions. The more they have, the better humor'd they should be taught to be, and the more compassionate and gentle to those of their brethren who are placed lower, and have scantier portions. If they are suffer'd from their cradles to treat men ill and rudely, because, by their father's title, they think they have a little power over them, at best it is ill-bred; and if care be not taken, will by degrees nurse up their natural pride into an habitual contempt of those beneath them. And where will that probably end but in oppression and cruelty?

It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man's head, will sometimes act like an obstruction ... in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Cash Payment the sole nexus; and there are so many things which cash will not pay! Cash is a great miracle; yet it has not all power in Heaven, nor even on Earth. 'Supply and demand' we will honour also; and yet how many 'demands' are there, entirely indispensable, which have to go elsewhere than to the shops, and produce quite other than cash, before they can get their supply? On the whole, what astonishing payments does cash make in this world!

To one unnamed, whose name will one day be named, is dedicated, with this little work, the entire authorship, as it was from the beginning.

I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge and an impatient eagerness to advance, also satisfaction at each progressive step. There was a time when I thought that all this could constitute the honor of humanity, and I despised the mob, which knows nothing about it. Rousseau set me straight. This dazzling excellence vanishes; I learn to honor men, and would consider myself much less useful than common laborers if I did not believe that this consideration could give all the others a value, to establish the rights of humanity.

I believe the world grows near its end, yet is neither old nor decayed, nor will ever perish upon the ruins of its own principles.

There are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon the taxes.

Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes (sensation-complexes) constitute the bodies. When the physicist considers the bodies as the permanent reality, the `elements' as the transient appearance, he does not realise that all `bodies' are only mental symbols for element-complexes (sensation-complexes)

Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.

The inexperienced in wisdom and virtue, ever occupied with feasting and such, are carried downward, and there, as is fitting, they wander their whole life long, neither ever looking upward to the truth above them nor rising toward it, nor tasting pure and lasting pleasures. Like cattle, always looking downward with their heads bent toward the ground and the banquet tables, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. In order to increase their possessions they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of steel and kill each other, insatiable as they are.

When we resist impermanence, the self intensifies.

The more I see of the world, the more I am convinced that civilisation is a blessing not sufficiently estimated by those who have not traced its progress; for it not only refines our enjoyments, but produces a variety which enables us to retain the primitive delicacy of our sensations. Without the aid of the imagination all the pleasures of the senses must sink into grossness, unless continual novelty serve as a substitute for the imagination, which, being impossible, it was to this weariness, I suppose, that Solomon alluded when he declared that there was nothing new under the sun!

There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see. Abstract rules indeed can help; but they help the less in proportion as our intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger for the moral life. For every real dilemma is in literal strictness a unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe without a precedent, and for which no adequate previous rule exists.

With other beliefs crumbling, many seek to return to what they piously describe as "Enlightenment values". But these values were not as unambiguously benign as is nowadays commonly supposed.

Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.

So near at hand is freedom, and is anyone still a slave?

Since labour is motion, time is its natural measure.

As to the objection that these rules are common in the world, that it is necessary to define every thing and to prove every thing, and that logicians themselves have placed them among their art, I would that the thing were true and that it were so well known... But so little is this the case, that, geometricians alone excepted, who are so few in number that they are a single in a whole nation and long periods of time, we see no others that know it.

Liars ... when they speak the truth they are not believed.

To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. We select granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten.

What, then, is the animal? First of all, a system of plant-souls. The unity of those plant-souls, which unity nature itself produces, is the soul of the animal. Its world is therefore partly that of the plants - its nourishment, for instance, it receives partly through synthesis from vegetable, and through analysis from animal nature - and partly that of the animals, whereof we shall speak directly. Each product of nature is an organically in-itself completed totality in space, like the plant. Hence, the unknown x which we are looking for must also be such a whole or totality, and in so far it must also have a principle of organization, a sphere and central point of this organization ; in short, the same which we have called the soul of the plant, which thus remains common to both. ... The animal is a system of plant-souls, and the plant is a separated, isolated part of an animal. Both reciprocally affect each other.

No one has a natural right to the trade of a money lender, but he who has the money to lend. Let those then among us who have a moneyed capital and who prefer employing it in loans rather than otherwise, set up banks and give cash or national bills for the notes they discount. Perhaps, to encourage them, a larger interest than is legal in the other cases might be allowed them, on the condition of their lending for short periods only.