Fundamental ideas play the most essential role in forming a physical theory. Books on physics are full of complicated mathematical formulae. But thought and ideas, not formulae, are the beginning of every physical theory. The ideas must later take the mathematical form of a quantitative theory, to make possible the comparison with experiment.

The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing their share to uphold them.

Abolish competition and replace it with association.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

It must not be supposed that the subjective elements are any less 'real' than the objective elements; they are only less important... because they do not point to anything beyond ourselves...

So far as it goes, a small thing may give an analogy of great things, and show the tracks of knowledge.

Without being known too well, it [India] has existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans as a wonderland. Its fame, which it has always had with regard to its treasures, both its natural ones, and in particular, its wisdom, has lured men there.

Ten thousand do not turn the scale against a single man of worth.

All became so jealous of the rights of their own personality that they did their very utmost to curtail and destroy them in others, and made that the chief thing in their lives. Slavery followed, even voluntary slavery; the weak eagerly submitted to the strong, on condition that the latter aided them to subdue the still weaker. Then there were saints who came to these people, weeping, and talked to them of their pride, of their loss of harmony and due proportion, of their loss of shame. They were laughed at or pelted with stones.

Yes, I am in favor of censorship, but it has to be conducted by people like me. And that's the difficulty (laughs). I'm in favor of encouraging every possible form of self-restraint and parental control. And I certainly don't think that pornography should be protected under the American Constitution.

Life is that which is discontent, which struggles and seeks, which suffers and creates.

The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.

Preaching has become a byword for long and dull conversation of any kind; and whoever wishes to imply, in any piece of writing, the absence of everything agreeable and inviting, calls it a sermon.

Phenomena of the external sense are examined and set forth in physics; those of the internal sense in empirical psychology. Pure mathematics considers space in geometry and time in pure mechanics. To these is to be added a certain concept, intellectual to be sure in itself, but whose becoming actual in the concrete requires the auxiliary notions of time and space in the successive addition and simultaneous juxtaposition of separate units, which is the concept of number treated in arithmetic.

Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting "Jesus Christ," so that it would read "A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;" the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.

Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.

Man must not only make himself: the weightiest thing he has to do is to determine what he is going to be. He is causa sui to the second power.

Nothing happens to anyone that he can't endure.

The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.

Consider that everything is opinion, and opinion is in thy power. Take away then, when thou choosest, thy opinion, and like a mariner, who has doubled the promontory, thou wilt find calm, everything stable, and a waveless bay.

Once we can see how this question of freedom of the will has been vitiated by post-romantic philosophy, with its inbuilt tendency to laziness and boredom, we can also see how it came about that existentialism found itself in a hole of its own digging, and how the philosophical developments since then have amounted to walking in circles round that hole.

Whereas economic man maximizes - selects the best alternative from among all those available to him, his cousin, administrative man, satisfices - looks for a course of action that is satisfactory or "good enough."

Speaking with sense we must fortify ourselves in the common sense of all, as a city is fortified by its law, and even more forcefully. For all human laws are nourished by the one divine law. For it prevails as far as it will and suffices for all and is superabundant.

Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.

Many have been deceived by outward appearances and have proceeded to write and teach about good works and how they justify without even mentioning faith. ... Wearying themselves with many works, they never come to righteousness.

People who invented the word charity, and used it in a good sense, inculcated more clearly, and much more efficaciously, the precept, Be charitable, than any pretended legislator or prophet, who should insert such a maxim in his writings.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

Roemer used eclipses of the satellites of Jupiter, and sought how much the event fell behind its prediction. But... this prediction is made... by... astronomic laws; for instance Newton's... The velocity of light... is adopted, such that the astronomic laws compatible with this value may be as simple as possible.

Nothing tends to materialize man and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind more than the extreme division of labor.

With rebellion, awareness is born.

Of the radical and iconoclastic ideals preached in the early years of the revolution, all were discarded except those which helped the state to exert absolute control over the individual. Hence the idea of collective education and reduction of parental authority to the minimum continued to hold sway, but an end was put to "progressive" educational methods designed to promote initiative and independence. Strict discipline became once more the rule, and in this respect Soviet schools differed from Tsarist ones only in the immensely increased emphasis on indoctrination. In due course, puritanical sexual ethics were restored to favour.

Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind.

Manufacture was all the time sheltered by protective duties in the hoe market, by monopolies in the colonial market, and broad as much as possible by differential duties.

The fact is that I've never called myself a genius, and I think the term has been cheapened by overuse into meaninglessness. If other people want to call me that, that's their problem.

Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance.

He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.

In a word, we reject all legislation, all authority, and all privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even though arising from universal suffrage, convinced that it can turn only to the advantage of a dominant minority of exploiters against the interest of the immense majority in subjection to them. This is the sense in which we are really Anarchists.

Even when there is no law, there is conscience.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

A truly powerful holder of power does not simply elicit agreement, but enthusiasm and excitement.

The dyad gets its name from passing through or asunder; for the dyad is the first to have separated itself from the monad, whence also it is called "daring." For when the monad manifests unification, the dyad steals in and manifests separation.

From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.

If nature has been frugal in her gifts and endowments, there is the more need of art to supply her defects. If she has been generous and liberal, know that she still expects industry and application on our part, and revenges herself in proportion to our negligent ingratitude. The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces, to its slothful owner, the most abundant crop of poisons.

Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, till the whole circle be completed.

All writers, not ours alone but foreigners also, who have sought to represent Absolute Beauty, were unequal to the task, for it is an infinitely difficult one. The beautiful is the ideal ; but ideals, with us as in civilized Europe, have long been wavering. There is in the world only one figure of absolute beauty: Christ. That infinitely lovely figure is, as a matter of course, an infinite marvel.