The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and society give expression in their operation.

It cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interest has been entirely neglected; but the producers, whose interests has been so carefully attended to; and among this later class our merchants and manufactures have been by far the principal architects. In the mercantile regulations, which have been taken notice of in this chapter, the interest of our manufacturers has been most peculiarly attended to;and the interest, not so much of the consumers, as that of some other sets of producers, has been sacrificed to it.

If the importation of foreign cattle, for example, were made ever so free, so few could be imported, that the grazing trade of Great Britain could be little affected by it. Live cattle are, perhaps, the only commodity of which the transportation is more expensive by sea than by land.

Heaven, in the production of things, is sure to be bountiful to them, according to their qualities. Hence the tree that is flourishing, it nourishes, while that which is ready to fall, it overthrows.

It is indifferent to me where I am to begin, for there shall I return again.

Nothing of the All is either empty or superfluous.

I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray...I am myself the matter of my book. To the Reader

So then it is eternal and infinite and one and all alike.

With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.

Cosmus, Duke of Florence, was wont to say of perfidious friends, that "We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends."

The dead govern the living.

It is because human needs are contradictory that no human life can be perfect. That does not mean that human life is imperfect. It means that the idea of perfection has no meaning.

The human being is not the lord of beings, but the shepherd of Being.

A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you're in the same room with him, you know it.

When Demaratus was asked whether he held his tongue because he was a fool or for want of words, he replied, "A fool cannot hold his tongue."

Let the eye of vigilance never be closed.

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.

In its solitariness the spirit asks, What, in the way of value, is the attainment of life? And it can find no such value till it has merged its individual claim with that of the objective universe.

The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need of being saved. The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks.

Men ... ask nothing better, it would seem, than to leave their destiny, their life, and all their thoughts in the hands of a few men with a gift for the exclusive manipulation of this or that technique.

Assist a man in raising a burden; but do not assist him in laying it down.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.

The standard of permanent Christianity must be kept clear in our minds and it is against that standard that we must test all contemporary thought. In fact, we must at all costs not move with the times.

Skepticism is slow suicide.

Descend where you will into the lower class, in Town or Country, by what avenue you will, by Factory Inquiries, Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by Mining-Labourer Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking, the same sorrowful result discloses itself: you have to admit that the working body of this rich English Nation has sunk or is fast sinking into a state, to which, all sides of it considered, there was literally never any parallel.

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.

A woman's body is a dark and monstrous mystery;between her supple thighs a heavy whirlpool swirls,two rivers crash, and woe to him who slips and falls!

We may assume the existence of an aether; only we must give up ascribing a definite state of motion to it, i.e. we must by abstraction take from it the last mechanical characteristic which Lorentz had still left it. ... But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it.

I greatly doubt whether the men who become pirate chiefs are those who are filled with retrospective terror of their fathers, or whether Napoleon, at Austerlitz, really felt that he was getting even with Madame Mère. I know nothing of the mother of Attila, but I rather suspect that she spoilt the little darling, who subsequently found the world irritating because it sometimes resisted his whims.

Staying as I am, one foot in one country and the other in another, I find my condition very happy, in that it is free.

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

You may break your heart, but men will still go on as before.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Rohde became more and more firmly bound to the bourgeois world, its institutions and accepted opinions. ... The contrast between the two natures makes Rohde and Nietzsche exemplary representatives of two distinctive worlds. In their youth they both live in the realm of boundless possibilities and feel an affinity through the exuberance of their noble aspirations. Subsequently they go in opposite directions. Nietzsche remains young, leaving concrete reality as his task assumes existential import. Rohde grows old, bourgeois, stable, and skeptical. Hence courage is a fundamental trait in Nietzsche, plaintive self-irony in Rohde. ... Rohde retained the interests but not the attitudes of his youth; he looked to the world of the Greeks for the object of his contemplation rather than the norm of obligation.

We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us, that in the depths of our own bodies, in animals, in plants, in rocks, in everything that lives, in all the Universe, there is a spirit that strives to know itself, to acquire consciousness of itself, to be itself - for to be oneself is to know oneself - to be pure spirit; and since it can only achieve this by means of the body, by means of matter, it creates and makes use of matter at the same time that it remains a prisoner of it.

The Crown of Great Britain cannot, in my opinion, be too magnificent. Let us see some great public works set on foot; let it never be said, that the Commons of Great Britain failed in what they owe to the first Crown in the world. Looking up to royalty, I do say, it is the oldest and one of the best parts of our constitution. I wish it should look like royalty; that it should look like a King; like a King of Great Britain.

Love one another. My final lesson of history is the same as that of Jesus. You may think that's a lot of lollipop but just try it. Love is the most practical thing in the world. If you take an attitude of love toward everybody you meet, you'll eventually get along. When asked, at the age of 92, if he could summarize the lessons of history into a single sentence.

Genuine religion is not about speculating about God or the soul or about what happened in the past or will happen in the future; it cares only about one thing-finding out exactly what should or should not be done in this lifetime.

If you let people follow their feelings, they will be able to do good. This is what is meant by saying that human nature is good.

The single harmony produced by all the heavenly bodies singing and dancing together springs from one source and ends by achieving one purpose, and has rightly bestowed the name not of "disordered" but of "ordered universe" upon the whole.

Might is that which makes a thing of anybody who comes under its sway. When exercised to the full, it makes a thing of man in the most literal sense, for it makes him a corpse.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

The Whigs of this day have before them, in this Appeal, their constitutional ancestors: They have the doctors of the modern school. They will choose for themselves. The author of the Reflections has chosen for himself. If a new order is coming on, and all the political opinions must pass away as dreams, which our ancestors have worshipped as revelations, I say for him, that he would rather be the last (as certainly he is the least) of that race of men, than the first and greatest of those who have coined to themselves Whig principles from a French die, unknown to the impress of our fathers in the constitution.

Be cheerful while you are alive.

The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief.

I am dreaming ...? Let me dream, if this dream is my life. Do not awaken me from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really believe in it ...? And wherefore do you want to be immortal? you ask me, wherefore? Frankly, I do not understand the question, for it is to ask the reason of the reason, the end of the end, the principle of the principle.