And love, above all when it struggles against destiny, overwhelms us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of appearances and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which destiny is overcome and liberty is law.

It might otherwise appear paradoxical that money can be replaced by worthless paper; but that the slightest alloying of its metallic content depreciates it.

When you are criticising the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

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.

The victor and the one who keeps My works to the end: I will give him authority over the nations and He will shepherd them with an iron scepter; He will shatter them like pottery just as I have received this from My Father.

The fact is that in order to do any thing in this world worth doing, we must not stand shivering on the bank thinking of the cold and the danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can.

He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.

The first authentic record on this subject (alchemy) is an edict of Diocletian, about 300 years after Christ, ordering a diligent search to be made in Egypt for all the ancient books which treated of the art of making gold and silver, that they might be consigned to the flames. This edict necessarily presumes a certain antiquity to the pursuit; and fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries.

O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire; One morn is in the mighty heaven, And one in our desire.

For what comes is Judgment: happy are those whom it finds labouring in their vocations, whether they were merely going out to feed the pigs or laying good plans to deliver humanity a hundred years hence from some great evil. The curtain has indeed now fallen. Those pigs will never in fact be fed, the great campaign against White Slavery or Governmental Tyranny will never in fact proceed to victory. No matter; you were at your post when the Inspection came.

It is no coincidence that the ABM Treaty was signed midway between the delinking of the U.S. dollar from the gold standard in 1971 and the first oil crisis in 1973. These were the years not only of monetary and economic crises but also of both the beginning of the destruction of the welfare state and the shift of the hegemony of economic production from the factory to more social and immaterial sectors. One might think of these various transformations as different faces of one common phenomenon, one grand social transformation.

My idea of heaven is, eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.

None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.

There are hardly any truths upon which we always remain agreed, and still fewer objects of pleasure which we do not change every hour, I do not know whether there is a means of giving fixed rules for adapting discourse to the inconstancy of our caprices.

If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.

You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

People trifle with love. Now, I deny that love is a strong passion. Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.

One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life. All discussions of 'life' which begin with a description of man's place on a speck of matter in space, in an endless evolutionary scale, are bound to be half-measures, because they leave out most of the experiences which are important to use as human beings.

It is a mistake to classify the passions as lawful and unlawful, so as to yield to the one and refuse the other. All alike are good if we are their masters; all alike are bad if we abandon ourselves to them. Nature forbids us to extend our relations beyond the limits of our strength; reason forbids us to want what we cannot get, conscience forbids us, not to be tempted, but to yield to temptation. To feel or not to feel a passion is beyond our control, but we can control ourselves. Every sentiment under our own control is lawful; those which control us are criminal. A man is not guilty if he loves his neighbour's wife, provided he keeps this unhappy passion under the control of the law of duty; he is guilty if he loves his own wife so greatly as to sacrifice everything to that love.

He had no failings which were not owing to a noble cause; to an ardent, generous, perhaps an immoderate passion for fame; a passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.

When the Indians complain that the English have enslaved them it is as if drunkards complained that the spirit-dealers who have settled among them have enslaved them. You tell them that they might give up drinking, but they reply that they are so accustomed to it that they cannot abstain, and that they must have alcohol to keep up their energy. Is it not the same thing with the millions of people who submit to thousands or even to hundreds, of others - of their own or other nations? If the people of India are enslaved by violence it is only because they themselves live and have lived by violence, and do not recognize the eternal law of love inherent in humanity.

There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.

The study of Ethics would, no doubt, be far more simple, and its results far more "systematic," if, for instance, pain were an evil of exactly the same magnitude as pleasure is a good; but we have no reason whatever to assume that the Universe is such that ethical truths must display this kind of symmetry ... .

The students of physical science are not unfrequently told that their pursuits unfit them for the estimation of moral probability. And it may be so, for I am afraid that to those who are accustomed to severe reasoning, either in the province of Science or in that of Law, reasoning from 'moral probability' is apt to be regarded as a process of accumulating inconclusive arguments, in the hope that a great heap of them may, at least, look as firm as one good demonstration.

Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state.

The final thing... the question of the nation, and the role of the nation in liberalism...There would seem to be a tension between liberalism's belief that all human beings enjoy... the same basic set of human rights, and the fact that we are divided up into nation states, in which the authority to enforce those rights is territorially limited. ...This contradiction can be bridged because... there is a liberal form of national identity which is not only possible, but... necessary if a liberal society is going to succeed.

One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature.

With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.

The wine is bottled poetry.

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

France had for some time been guilty of a continued series of hostile acts against this country, both external and internal: first, she directed her pursuits to universal empire, under the name of fraternity, in order to overturn the fabric of our laws and government.

This new philosophy, however, was far from giving the temporal an inherent position and function in the constitution of things. Change was acting on the side of man but only because of fixed laws which governed the changes that take place. There was hope in change just because the laws that govern it do not change.

It is impossible for a man who secretly violates the terms of the agreement not to harm or be harmed to feel confident that he will remain undiscovered, even if he has already escaped ten thousand times; for until his death he is never sure that he will not be detected.

I am a lover of liberty. I will not and I cannot serve a party.

The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife etc., is sure to be noticed.

Train any population rationally, and they will be rational. Furnish honest and useful employments to those so trained, and such employments they will greatly prefer to dishonest or injurious occupations. It is beyond all calculation the interest of every government to provide that training and that employment; and to provide both is easily practicable.

By quarrelling amongst themselves, instead of confederating, Germans and Scandinavians, both of them belonging to the same great race, only prepare the way for their hereditary enemy, the Slav. 

Intuitionism is not constructive, perfectionism is unacceptable.

In the 1980s and 90s there was an extension of the autonomy of individual property owners in... a movement towards neoliberalism represented by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and... by the Chicago school of economics that denigrated... the role of the state in the economy, that said the private markets would be able to solve most social distribution problems and the like. This was true in many ways. The world did become much richer in this period, but it also became much more unequal... Without adequate regulation and... effort to protect people against the excesses of market capitalism, you had people... left behind, even as their societies as a whole, grew. ...This ...became one of the triggers for the kind of populism we've seen arise in many rich countries.

To become properly acquainted with a truth, we must first have disbelieved it, and disputed against it.

Science ... commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed through words, so to convey this so that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.

Oceans of horse-hair, continents of parchment, and learned-sergeant eloquence, were it continued till the learned tongue wore itself small in the indefatigable learned mouth, cannot make unjust just.

Someone in despair despairs over something. So, for a moment, it seems, but only for a moment. That same instant the true despair shows itself, or despair in its true guise. In despairing over something he was really despairing over himself, and he wants now to be rid of himself.

The Americans' "open-mindedness", which is sometimes cited in their favor, is the other side of their interior formlessness. The same goes for their "individualism". Individualism and personality are not the same: the one belongs to the formless world of quantity, the other to the world of quality and hierarchy. The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, "I think, therefore I am": Americans do not think, yet they are. The American "mind", puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization.

The good is the everlasting, the pinnacle of our life. ... life is striving towards the good, toward God. The good is the most basic idea ... an idea not definable by reason ... yet is the postulate from which all else follows. But the beautiful ... is just that which is pleasing. The idea of beauty is not an alignment to the good, but is its opposite, because for most part, the good aids in our victory over our predilections, while beauty is the motive of our predilections. The more we succumb to beauty, the further we are displaced from the good. ...the usual response is that there exists a moral and spiritual beauty ... we mean simply the good. Spiritual beauty or the good, generally not only does not coincide with the typical meaning of beauty, it is its opposite.

Choose rather to be strong in soul than in body.