There are circumstances in which even the least energetic of mankind learn to behave with vigour and decision; and the most cautious forget their prudence and embrace foolhardy resolutions.

My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility or the ensigns of a new order are in Europe.

There is a great analogy between grace and genius, for genius is a grace. The real man of genius is the one who acts by grace or by impulsion, without ever contemplating himself and without ever saying to himself: Yes! It is by grace that I act.

If man has learned to see and know what really is, he will act in accordance with truth, Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.

Station, power, wealth-how inadequate they have proved! How useless and insecure!

The man who is tenacious of purpose in a rightful cause is not shaken from his firm resolve by the frenzy of his fellow citizens clamoring for what is wrong, or by the tyrant's threatening countenance.

With a drunken man do not walk on the road.

Dialogue and monologue are silenced. Bundled together, men march without Thou and without I, those of the left who want to abolish memory, and those of the right who want to regulate it: hostile and separated hosts, they march into the common abyss.

since our leading men think themselves in a seventh heaven, if there are bearded mullets in their fish-ponds that will come to hand for food, and neglect everything else, do not you think that I am doing no mean service if I secure that those who have the power, should not have the will, to do any harm?

The merits of democracy are negative: it does not insure good government, but it prevents certain evils.

The essence of the modern state is the union of the universal with the full freedom of the particular, and with the welfare of individuals.

That we are overdone with banking institutions which have banished the precious metals and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium, that these have withdrawn capital from useful improvements and employments to nourish idleness, that the wars of the world have swollen our commerce beyond the wholesome limits of exchanging our own productions for our own wants, and that, for the emolument of a small proportion of our society who prefer these demoralizing pursuits to labors useful to the whole, the peace of the whole is endangered and all our present difficulties produced, are evils more easily to be deplored than remedied.

In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance.

The mosaic form of the TV image demands participation and involvement in depth, of the whole being, as does the sense of touch.

The world is so possessed by the power of what is and the efforts of adjustment to it, that the adolescent's rebellion, which once fought the father because his practices contradicted his own ideology, can no longer crop up. ... Psychologically, the father is ... replaced by the world of things.

There are depths in man which go down the length of the lowest Hell, as there are heights which reach the highest Heaven; - for are not both Heaven and Hell made out of him, everlasting Miracle and Mystery that he is?

Joy! Joy! I did not know that all this world is so much part of me, that we are all one army, that windflowers and stars struggle to right and left of me and do not know me; but I turn to them and hail them. The Universe is warm, beloved, familiar, and it smells like my own body. It is Love and War both, a raging restlessness, persistence and uncertainty. Uncertainty and terror. In a violent flash of lightning I discern on the highest peak of power the final, the most fearful pair embracing: Terror and Silence. And between them, a Flame.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove. All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world.

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss.

Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.

What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows.

One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves.

Works of art express space as opportunity for movement and action.

The Autarch maintained his indifferent calm, but a certain lack of certainty was gathering, and he did not like to experience a lack of certainty. He liked nothing which made him aware of limitations. An Autarch should have no limitations, and on Lingane he had none that natural law did not impose.

Animals no doubt have different interests from humans, and may experience different pleasures and pains, but the principle of equal consideration for similar interests still holds, and pleasures and pains of similar intensity and duration should be given equal weight, whether they are experienced by humans or by animals.

The jingoes and war speculators are filling the air with the sentimental slogan of hypocritical nationalism, "America for Americans," "America first, last, and all the time."

I am not the light, I am the night; but a flame stabs through my entrails and consumes me. I am the night devoured by light.

The whole analogy of natural operations furnishes so complete and crushing an argument against the intervention of any but what are termed secondary causes, in the production of all the phenomena of the universe; that, in view of the intimate relations between Man and the rest of the living world; and between the forces exerted by the latter and all other forces, I can see no excuse for doubting that all are co-ordinated terms of Nature's great progression, from the formless to the formed-from the inorganic to the organic-from blind force to conscious intellect and will.

The "tragic flaw" is not a detail of characterization, a mere "fly in the ointment", but a structural feature of ordinary consciousness.

When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.

Man's power appears to have increased out of all proportion to his wisdom. He has never been in a better position to build a healthy, happy, and productive world; yet things have perhaps never seemed so black.

Not to feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren't packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human--however imperfectly--and fully embrace the pursuit that you've embarked on. (Hays translation) Flinch not, neither give up nor despair, if the achieving of every act in accordance with right principle is not always continuous with thee.

All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?

The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself: in science, at least, his respect for authority is on the whole beneficial.

That the individual is of himself a world's history, and possesses his property in the rest of the world's history, goes beyond what is Christian. To the Christian the world's history is the higher thing, because it is the history of Christ or 'man'; to the egoist only his history has value, because he wants to develop only himself not the mankind-idea, not God's plan, not the purposes of Providence, not liberty, and the like. He does not look upon himself as a tool of the idea or a vessel of God, he recognizes no calling, he does not fancy that he exists for the further development of mankind and that he must contribute his mite to it, but he lives himself out, careless of how well or ill humanity may fare thereby.

It is the privilege of true genius, and certainly of the genius that opens a new road, to make without punishment great mistakes.

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He has disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.

Those who were best able to provide themselves with the means of security against their neighbors, being thus in possession of the surest guarantee, passed the most agreeable life in each other's society; and their enjoyment of the fullest intimacy was such that, if one of them died before his time, the survivors did not mourn his death as if it called for sympathy.

Nonviolent forms of resistance can and must be aggressively pursued. A practice of aggressive nonviolence is, therefore, not a contradiction in terms. Mahatma Gandhi insisted that satyagraha, or "soul force," his name for a practice and politics of nonviolence, is a nonviolent force, one that consists at once of an "insistence on truth ... that arms the votary with matchless power." To understand this force or strength, there can be no simple reduction to physical strength. At the same time, "soul force" takes an embodied form. The practice of "going limp" before political power is, on the one hand, a passive posture, and is thought to belong to the tradition of passive resistance; at the same time, it is a deliberate way of exposing the body to police power, of entering the field of violence, and of exercising an adamant and embodied form of political agency. It requires suffering, yes, but for the purposes of transforming both oneself and social reality.

How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.

In the final, positive state, the mind has given over the vain search after Abolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe, and the cause of phenomenon, and applies itself to the tudy of their laws, - that is, their invariable relations of succession and resemblance. Reasoning and observation, duly combined, are the means of this knowledge. What is now understood when we speak of an explanation of the facts is simply the establishment of a connection between single phenomena and some general facts, the number of which continually diminishes with the progress of science.

But to manipulate men, to propel them towards goals which you - the social reformer - see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.

God the Almighty has made our rulers mad; they actually think they can do-and order their subjects to do-whatever they please. And the subjects make the mistake of believing that they, in turn, are bound to obey their rulers in everything.

The reason for sketching what's technically feasible with the tools of synthetic biology is that only after human complicity in the persistence of suffering in the biosphere is acknowledged can we hope to have an informed socio-political debate on the morality of its perpetuation. No serious ethical discussion of free-living animal suffering can begin in the absence of recognition of human responsibility for nonhuman well-being.

The Law of conservation of energy tells us we can't get something for nothing, but we refuse to believe it.