I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.

The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counterauthority to the law.

The virtue of frugality lies in a middle between avarice and profusion, of which the one consists in an excess, the other in a defect of the proper attention to the objects of self-interest.

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

If God stops a man on the road, and calls him with a revelation and sends him armed with divine authority among men, they say to him; from whom dost thou come? He answers: from God. But now God cannot help his messenger physically like a king, who gives him soldiers or policemen, or his ring or his signature, which is known to all; in short, God cannot help men by providing them with physical certainty that an Apostle is an Apostle-which would, moreover, be nonsense. Even miracles, if the Apostle has that gift, give no physical certainty; for the miracle is the object of faith.

The telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.

To require that a so-called layman should not use his own reason in religious matters, particularly since religion is to be appreciated as moral, but instead follow the appointed clergyman and thus someone else's reason, is an unjust demand because as to morals every man must account for all his doings. The clergyman will not and even cannot assume such a responsibility.

Gentleness, as opposed to an irascible temper, greatly contributes to the tranquility and happiness of life, by preserving the mind from perturbation, and arming it against the assaults of calumny and malice.

Even the free importation of foreign corn could very little affect the interest of the farmers of Great Britain. Corn is a much more bulky commodity than butcher's-meat. A pound of wheat at a penny is as dear as a pound of butcher's-meat at fourpence. The small quantity of foreign corn imported even in times of the greatest scarcity, may satisfy our farmers that they can have nothing to fear from the freest importation.

Titles are an important part of a story and I take considerable care in choosing one. In fact, I cannot start a story until I have chosen a title.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality.

Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.

In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.

We have, indeed, in the part taken by many scientific men in this controversy of "Law versus Miracle," a good illustration of the tenacious vitality of superstitions. Ask one of our leading geologists or physiologists whether he believes in the Mosaic account of the creation, and he will take the question as next to an insult. Either he rejects the narrative entirely, or understands it in some vague non-natural sense. ...Whence ...this notion of "special creations"...Why, after rejecting all the rest of the story, he should strenuously defend this last remnant of it, as though he had received it on valid authority, he would be puzzled to say.

We favor hypotheses for their simplicity and explanatory power, much as the architect of the world might have done in choosing which possibility to create.

He dies twice who perishes by his own hand.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

Insurrection ... never brings about the desired improvement. For insurrection lacks discernment; it generally harms the innocent more than the guilty. Hence, no insurrection is ever right, no matter how right the cause it seeks to promote.

The will to the "true world" in the sense of Plato and Christianity ... is in truth a no-saying to our present world, precisely the one in which art is at home.

No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope. consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater - unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.

For Jung, the 'psychic world' (i.e. the world of the mind) was an independent reality, and it was possible to travel there and make the acquaintance of its inhabitants.

Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.

There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.

Real power begins where secrecy begins.

To apply oneself to great inventions, starting from the smallest beginnings, is no task for ordinary minds; to divine that wonderful arts lie hid behind trivial and childish things is a conception for superhuman talents.

Music for entertainment ... seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility.

Man, if he is to remain man, must advance by way of consciousness. There is no road leading backward. ... We can no longer veil reality from ourselves by renouncing self-consciousness without simultaneously excluding ourselves from the historical course of human existence.

Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts. He has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.

God created everything by number, weight and measure.

"Do not die that we may not die," the dead cry out within you. "We had no time to enjoy the women we desired; be in time, sleep with them! We had no time to turn our thoughts into deeds; turn them into deeds! We had no time to grasp and to crystallize the face of our hope; make it firm!" ... But you must choose with care whom to hurl down again into the chasms of your blood, and whom you shall permit to mount once more into the light and the earth.

O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him hither to me.

What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it heaven.

Husserl has shown that man's prejudices go a great deal deeper than his intellect or his emotions. Consciousness itself is 'prejudiced' - that is to say, intentional.

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their simulation models.

Often it is only after immense intellectual effort, which may have continued over centuries, that humanity at last succeeds in achieving knowledge of a concept in its pure form, by stripping off the irrelevant accretions which veil it from the eye of the mind.

Amid all these things, beyond all these things every man and nation, every plant and animal, every god and demon, charges upward like an army inflamed by an incomprehensible, unconquerable Spirit. We struggle to make this Spirit visible, to give it a face, to encase it in words, in allegories and thoughts and incantations, that it may not escape us. But it cannot be contained in the twentysix letters of an alphabet which we string out in rows; we know that all these words, these allegories, these thoughts, and these incantations are, once more, but a new mask with which to conceal the Abyss.

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet- the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.

The Catholic solution of our problem, of our unique vital problem, the problem of the immortality and eternal salvation of the soul, satisfies the will, and therefore satisfies life; but the attempt to rationalize it by means of a dogmatic theology fails to satisfy the reason. And reason has its exigencies as imperious as those of life. It is no use seeking to force ourselves to consider as super-rational what clearly appears to us to be contra-rational... Infallibility, a notion of Hellenic origin, is in its essence a rationalistic category.

Where this will end? In the Abyss, one may prophecy; whither all Delusions are, at all moments, travelling; where this Delusion has now arrived. For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live for ever. The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, and Heaven's Chancery itself; and, slowly or fast, advance incessantly towards their hour.

The question of "unreality," which confronts us at this point, is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important.

It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.

Harvard now, I think, suffers from a kind of self-idolatry, that it needs to be critical of itself in order to grow. And again, if you can be in contact with the best of its past, then it's got a chance. But if it just remains well adjusted to the status quo, generating careerist and opportunist students rather than critically oriented students who have a heart and soul, concerned about suffering here and around the world - then Harvard has a chance. I'm not giving up on Harvard, but I am making my way to New York.

To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

For sometimes it is an act of bravery even to live.

A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good.