There is one story left, one road: that it is. And on this road there are very many signs that, being, is uncreated and imperishable, whole, unique, unwavering, and complete.

To none is life given in freehold; to all on lease.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstacies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude.

For we carry our fate with us - and it carries us.

Everyone knows that time is Death, that Death hides in clocks. Imposing another time powered by the Clock of the Imagination, however, can refuse his law. Here, freed of the Grim Reaper's scythe, we learn that pain is knowledge and all knowledge pain.

Struggling to be brief I become obscure.

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.

The STATE IDEA, the authoritarian principle, has been proven bankrupt by the experience of the Russian Revolution. If I were to sum up my whole argument in one sentence I should say: The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic. These two tendencies are incompatible and mutually destructive. The State idea killed the Russian Revolution and it must have the same result in all other revolutions, unless the libertarian idea prevail.

It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term "feminism," to focus on the fact that to be "feminist" in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.

Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.

The last thing abandoned by a party is its phraseology, because among political parties, as elsewhere, the vulgar make the language, and the vulgar abandon more easily the ideas that have been instilled into it than the words that it has learnt. France Before The Consulate, Chapter I: "How the Republic was ready to accept a master", in Memoir, Letters, and Remains, Vol I (1862), p. 266 Variant translation: The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary. This is because, in party politics as in other matters, it is the crowd who dictates the language, and the crowd relinquishes the ideas it has been given more readily than the words it has learned.

There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on Earth.

A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'.

Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.

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

How many valiant men we have seen to survive their own reputation!

Just acquiring this amount of "education" will not, by itself, make you an educated person, even less will it give you what Oakeshott calls "judgment." But if the manner of instruction is adequate, the student should be able to acquire this much knowledge in a way that combines intellectual openness, critical scrutiny, and logical clarity. If so, learning will not stop when the student leaves the university.

Declining from the public ways, walk in unfrequented paths.

We should like to represent... the... universe, and... feel... we understood it. We... never can attain this representation: our weakness is too great. But... we desire... to conceive an infinite intelligence... which should see all, and... classify all in its time, as we classify, in our time, the little we see. ...This supreme intelligence would be only a demigod; infinite in one sense... limited in another, since it would have... imperfect recollection of the past... otherwise all recollections would be equally present... and for it there would be no time.

There is no one at the Communion table who retains against you even the least of your sins, no one, unless you yourself do it. So cast them away from yourself, and the recollection of them, lest in it your retain them; and cast the recollection of your having cast your sins away, lest in it you retain them.

Thou hast made us for Thyself, and the heart never resteth till it findeth rest in Thee.

There is the world for you. Beauty, true beauty, is intangible. It is in the eye of the beholder. Something that we can lose at any moment, and the more you examine it, the more illusive it becomes. True happiness is virtue, and virtue is predicated on knowledge and righteous conduct.

Many evils, no doubt, were produced by the civil war. They were the price of our liberty.

There is a kind of selective memory that afflicts men when they view the past. They see the good and overlook the evil.

In democratic countries, the most important private organizations are economic. Unlike secret societies, they are able to exercize their terrorism without illegality, since they do not threaten to kill their enemies, but only to starve them.

Everything should be made simple as possible but no simpler.

In our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no true and absolute account of things. The spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. You have only to discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it.

It is not fit that I should give myself pain, for I have never intentionally given pain even to another.

There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy'.

This is precisely what is decisive in Nietzsche's conception of art, that he sees it in its essential entirety in terms of the artist; this he does consciously and in explicit opposition to that conception of art which represents it in terms of those who "enjoy" and "experience" it.That is a guiding principle of Nietzsche's teaching on art: art must be grasped in terms of creators and producers, not recipients. Nietzsche expresses it unequivocally in the following words (WM, 811): "Our aesthetics heretofore has been a woman's aesthetics, inasmuch as only the recipients of art have formulated their experiences of 'what is beautiful.' In all philosophy to date the artist is missing." Philosophy of art means "aesthetics" for Nietzsche too-but masculine aesthetics, not feminine aesthetics. The question of art is the question of the artist as the productive, creative one; his experiences of what is beautiful must provide the standard.

But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.

Of all the cultural aspects of humanity, the only one which is not broken up into national or regional splinters is science. Different nations have different languages, they may have different religions, may have different dietaries, may have different holidays, different ways of thinking, but here's only one science. 

But what is lawful for all extends across wide-ruling aether and, without cease, through endless sunshine.

Man is a born geometer. Even when he is expressing himself in curves, as he has done in the undulating roofs of Eastern Asia and in the flowing sculptures at Borobudur, his lines follow mathematical laws that are unknown to Nature; and he is frankly defying her when he works in rectangles. Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to light... The Buddhist stupa at Borobudur in Central Java is a lyric poem in stone, flowing round the crown of a hill to the musical accompaniment of a jagged mountain range on one side and a green expanse of rice fields on the other. Angkor is not orchestral; it is monumental. It is an epic poem which makes its effect, like the Odyssey and like Paradise Lost, by the grandeur of its structure as well as by the beauty of the details. Angkor is an epic in rectangular forms imposed upon the Cambodian jungle.

Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.

What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. The child watching TV loves these people, you know -- they're in color, and they're talking to the child. Why wouldn't a child relate to these people? And you know, if you can't sleep at 3 o'clock in the morning, you can turn on a switch, and there are your friends and relatives, and they obviously like you. And they're charming. Who wouldn't want Peter Jennings for a relative? This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house.

I believe that freedom is not a constant attribute that "we have" or "we don't have"; perhaps there is only one reality: the act of liberating ourselves in the process of using choices. Every step in life that heightens the maturity of man heightens his ability to choose the freeing alternative. I believe that "freedom of choice" is not always equal for all men at every moment. The man with an exclusively necrophilic orientation; who is narcissistic; or who is symbiotic-incestuous, can only make a regressive choice. The free man, freed from irrational ties, can no longer make a regressive choice.

Human or general needs can be satisfied through society; for satisfaction of unique needs you must do some seeking. A friend and a friendly service, or even an individual's service, society cannot procure you. And yet you will every moment be in need of such a service, and on the slightest occasions require somebody who is helpful to you. Therefore do not rely on society, but see to it that you have the wherewithal to - purchase the fulfilment of your wishes.

Morality must be the heart of our existence, if it is to be what it wants to be for us. ... The highest form of philosophy is ethics. Thus all philosophy begins with "I am." The highest statement of cognition must be an expression of that fact which is the means and ground for all cognition, namely, the goal of the I.

The animating purpose of James was, on the other hand, primarily moral and artistic. It is expressed in his phrase, "block universe," employed as a term of adverse criticism. Mechanism and idealism were abhorrent to him because they both hold to a closed universe in which there is no room for novelty and adventure. Both sacrifice individuality and all the values, moral and aesthetic, which hang upon individuality; for according to absolute idealism, as to mechanistic materialism, the individual is simply a part determined by the whole of which he is a part. Only a philosophy of pluralism, of genuine indetermination, and of change which is real and intrinsic gives significance to individuality. It alone justifies struggle in creative activity and gives opportunity for the emergence of the genuinely new.

The man who esteems himself as he ought, and no more than he ought, seldom fails to obtain from other people all the esteem that he himself thinks due. He desires no more than is due to him, and he rests upon it with complete satisfaction.

The march of the human mind is slow.