I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared "that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow".

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past.

Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.

Death weighs on him who is known to all, but dies unknown to himself.

The Churches as Churches-as institutions affirming their own infallibility-are anti-Christian institutions. Between the Churches as such and Christianity, not only is there nothing in common except the name, but they are two quite opposite and opposing principles. The one represents pride, violence, self-assertion, immobility and death: the other humility, penitence, meekness, progress, and life.

The 'open' mind of the poet and artist can sense realities beyond the reach of our normal senses. The real problem is that our materialistic assumptions have a number of false premises built into them: it is only when we recognize this that we see there is no sharp dividing line between the everyday world and the invisible world of the clairvoyant.

For nature is not merely present, but is implanted within things, distant from none; naught is distant from her except the false, and that which existed never and nowhere-nullity. And while the outer face of things changeth so greatly, there flourisheth the origin of being more intimately within all things than they themselves. The fount of all kinds, Mind, God, Being, One, Truth, Destiny, Reason, Order.

Thus no fortune, no external circumstance, can shut off the wise man from action. For the very thing which engages his attention prevents him from attending to other things. He is ready for either outcome: if it brings goods, he controls them; if evils, he conquers them.

Apart from any other basis which might justify a superiority, education, as a power, raised him who possessed it over the weak, who lacked it, and the educated man counted in his circle, however large or small it was, as the mighty, the powerful, the imposing one: for he was an authority.

It's not about telling people how to be, outside of supporting ideals that teach us what to avoid.

I too am not one to despise myths, and I am far from rejecting those that have the right tendency; indeed I am of the same opinion as you and your admired, or rather the universally admired, Plato. He also often conveyed a serious lesson in his myths.

Our Constitution, by its separation of powers and its system of checks and balances, acts as a restraint upon efficiency by denying exclusive power to any branch of government. The logic of governmental efficiency, unchecked, runs straight on, not only to dictatorship, but also to torture, assassination, and other abominations.

It is only the individual possessed of the most entire sincerity that can exist under Heaven, who can adjust the great invariable relations of mankind, establish the great fundamental virtues of humanity, and know the transforming and nurturing operations of Heaven and Earth; shall this individual have any being or anything beyond himself on which he depends? Call him man in his ideal, how earnest is he! Call him an abyss, how deep is he! Call him Heaven, how vast is he! Who can know him, but he who is indeed quick in apprehension, clear in discernment, of far-reaching intelligence, and all-embracing knowledge, possessing all Heavenly virtue?

There are pretenses which are very sincere, and marriage is their school.

What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood? I have said elsewhere that the loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to doughnuts and ham and sweet potatoes and the loyalty to the German Vaterland is the loyalty to Pfannkuchen and Christmas Stollen. As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini... in food, as in death, we feel the essential brotherhood of mankind.

Alas, time comes and time goes, it subtracts little by little; then it deprives a person of a good, the loss of which he indeed feels, and his pain is great. Alas, and he does not discover that long ago it has already taken away from him the most important thing of all-the capacity to make a resolution-and it has made him so familiar with this condition that there is no consternation over it, the last thing that could help gain new power for renewed resolution!

The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

Only after Winter comes do we know that the pine and the cypress are the last to fade.

Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.

To SEE and accept the boundaries of the human mind without vain rebellion, and in these severe limitations to work ceaselessly without protest - this is where man's first duty lies.

The retinue of a grandee in China or Indostan accordingly is, by all accounts, much more numerous and splendid than that of the richest subjects of Europe.

An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it - neither higher nor lower.

One must love humanity in order to reach out into the unique essence of each individual: no one can be too low or too ugly.

Love is a contradiction if there is no God.

The Africans had that claim on our humanity which could not be resisted, whatever might have been advanced by an hon. gentleman in defence of the property of the planters.

Hearken with your ears to these best counsels,Reflect upon them with illumined judgment.Let each one choose his creed with that freedom of choice each must have at great events.

Philosophy has been called the search for the Permanent amid the changing. With this account of philosophy there is no need to quarrel. But having accepted it, a distinction remains to be observed, a distinction of capital importance, which we are in constant danger of forgetting. It is one thing to find the Permanent; it is another thing to find a form of words in which the Permanent shall stand permanently expressed. It is one thing to experience something fixed and changeless; it is another thing to fix this something by a changeless definition. The first may be possible, while the second remains impossible for ever.

I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

It is so rare to meet with a man out-doors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands.

This final aim is God's purpose with the world; but God is the absolutely perfect Being, and can, therefore, will nothing but himself.

For the inquisition of Final Causes is barren, and like a virgin consecrated to God produces nothing.

In life, in true life, there can be nothing better than what is. Wanting something different than what is, is blasphemy.

This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge; a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules, from which it extends its effects and by which it extends its effects and by which it masks its exorbitant singularity.

The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is what? The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.

Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

Let me now try to gather up all these odds and ends of commentary and restate the law of mind, in a unitary way.

He kept the middle way, that's all: he was the type of man for whom one has an affection of the mild but steady order - which is the kind that wears best.

It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus in the discipline of yoga are human beings, not supermen. We must not put them, as we have put Jesus Christ, on pedestals of reverence so high that we automatically exclude ourselves from their states of consciousness.

It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world.

But you must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.''What would the third be?''Some have thought that all these loves were copies of our love for the Landlord.'

We feel and know that we are eternal.

I shall not have it judged by any man, not even by any angel. For since I am certain of it, I shall be your judge and even the angels' judge through this teaching (as St. Paul says [1 Cor. 6:3]) so that whoever does not accept my teaching may not be saved - for it is God's teaching and not mine.

There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.