From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive.

I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist, I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I'm an entertainer. That is to say, in the same sense, that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music. He doesn't want to convert you to anything. He doesn't want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart's music as opposed to, say, Beethoven's. And I approach you in the same spirit as a musician with his piano or a violinist with his violin. I just want you to enjoy a point of view that I enjoy.

Philosophy is not politics, and we do our best, within our all-too-human limitations, to seek the truth, not to score points against opponents. There is little satisfaction in gaining an easy triumph over a weak opponent while ignoring better arguments against your views. 

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.

A man may own a thousand acres of land, and yet he still sleeps upon a bed of five feet.

How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?

To teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning "what to feel" in the various circumstances that prompt them.

I feel like that intellectual but plain-looking lady who was warmly complimented on her beauty. In accepting his Nobel Prize, in December 1950; Russell denied that he had contributed anything in particular to literature.

A life of action, if it is to be useful, must be a life of compromise. But speculation admits of no compromise. A public-man is often under the necessity of consenting to measures which he dislikes, lest he should endanger the success of measures which he thinks of vital importance.

In archery we have something like the way of the superior man. When the archer misses the center of the target, he turns round and seeks for the cause of his failure in himself.

Boundless compassion for all living beings is the surest and most certain guarantee of pure moral conduct, and needs no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will assuredly injure no one, do harm to no one, encroach on no man's rights; he will rather have regard for every one, forgive every one, help every one as far as he can, and all his actions will bear the stamp of justice and loving-kindness. ... In former times the English plays used to finish with a petition for the King. The old Indian dramas close with these words: "May all living beings be delivered from pain." Tastes differ; but in my opinion there is no more beautiful prayer than this.

The rottenness of the matter which is the foundation of everything!

The Constitution of the United States asserts that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty.

The happy consciousness is shaky enough-a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.

I am a mariner of Odysseus with heart of fire but with mind ruthless and clear.

I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the selfs humiliations.

The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.

Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one volume octavo; and nothing remained after his time, but mind - which experienced a similar fate from the hand of Mr. Hume, in 1737.

To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.

Growth is slow but collapse is rapid.

Freedom and not servitude is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition.

It is an axiom in my mind, that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of instruction. This it is the business of the State to effect, and on a general plan.

If, as I maintain and firmly believe, there is no objective definition of intelligence, and what we call intelligence is only a creation of cultural fashion and subjective prejudice, what the devil is it we test when we make use of an intelligence test?

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem.

Time, and Industry, produce everyday new knowledge.

In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence and doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror's attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: There is no frontier between being and appearing.

The African [slave] trade was, in his opinion, an absolute robbery. It therefore could not be a doubt with the House, whether it was proper to abolish it.

Beneficence is a duty. He who often practices this, and sees his beneficent purpose succeed, comes at last really to love him whom he has benefited. When, therefore, it is said, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," this does not mean, "Thou shalt first of all love, and by means of love (in the next place) do him good"; but: "Do good to thy neighbour, and this beneficence will produce in thee the love of men (as a settled habit of inclination to beneficence)."

In Catch-22, the figure of the black market and the ground of war merge into a monster presided over by the syndicate. When war and market merge, all money transactions begin to drip blood.

God only pours out his light into the mind after having subdued the rebellion of the will by an altogether heavenly gentleness which charms and wins it.

There is not love of life without despair about life.

In 1903 there appeared Problems of Idealism, a collection of essays many of whose authors had recently been Marxists, but which condemned Marxism and materialism for their moral nihilism, contempt of personality, determinism, and fanatical pursuit of social values regardless of the individuals who made up society; they also attacked Marxism for its uncritical worship of progress and sacrifice of the present to the future.

The physical change in the thickness of walls since the Middle Ages could be shown in a diagram. In the fourteenth century each house was a fortress. Man spent the major portion of his day in them, in secret and well-defended solitude. That solitude, working on the soul hour after hour, forged it, like a transcendent blacksmith, into a compact and forceful character. Under its treatment, man consolidated his individual destiny and sallied forth with impunity, never yielding to the contamination from the public. It is only in isolation that we gain, almost automatically, a certain discrimination in ideas, desires, longings, that we learn which are ours, and which are anonymous, floating in the air, falling on us like dust in the street.

The passion of laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmities of others, or with our own formerly...

Following Foucault, we may define the art of life as a practice of suicide, of giving oneself to death, of depsychologizing oneself, of playing.

I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time - a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment... only to vanish forever.

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

We boil at different degrees.

To know the nature of man, the most direct and wisest way undoubtedly is to know what he has always been. Since when can theories be opposed to facts? History is experimental politics; this is the best or rather the only good politics.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

When I first read The Wretched of the Earth I heard a new history spoken-the voice of the decolonised subject raised in resistance. That voice . . . articulated a yearning for freedom that was so intense and a quality of emotional hunger that was so fierce that it was overwhelming. Dying into the text, I abandoned and forgot myself. The lust for freedom in those pages awakened and resurrected me.

In a revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.

He also said to them, "You completely invalidate God's command in order to maintain your tradition! For Moses said: Honor your father and your mother; and, Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must be put to death.

The only progress I can see is progress in the organization. The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. We can transmit to them neither our knowledge of life nor of mathematics. Each must learn its lesson anew.