The only knowledge that can truly orient action is knowledge that frees itself from mere human interests and is based in Ideas-in other words knowledge that has taken a theoretical attitude.

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

Where children are, there is a golden age.

You can never do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

If you feel irritated by the absurd remarks of two people whose conversation you happen to overhear, you should imagine that you are listening to a dialogue of two fools in a comedy.

With deep roots Ether plunged into earth.

Although meaningless in a tribal context, numbers and statistics assume mythic and magical qualities of infallibility in literate societies.

Even if there never have been actions arising from such pure sources, what is at issue here is not whether this or that happened; that, instead, reason by itself and independently of all appearances commands what ought to happen; that, accordingly, actions of which the world has perhaps so far given no example, and whose very practicability might be very much doubted by one who bases everything on experience, are still inflexibly commanded by reason ... because ... duty ... lies, prior to all experience, in the idea of a reason determing the will by means of apriori grounds.

I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide . . .

Free-market fundamentalism trivializes the concern for public interest. It puts fear and insecurity in the hearts of anxiety-ridden workers. It also makes money-driven, poll-obsessed elected officials deferential to corporate goals of profit - often at the cost of the common good. ... The free-market fundamentalism that prevails in the United States today promotes the pervasive sleepwalking of the populace. People see that the false prophets are handsomely rewarded - with money, status and access to more power. ... We are experiencing the sad gangsterization of America - an unbridled grasp at power, wealth and status.

Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.

Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not one of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them cared about; Anna Pávlovna observed these greetings with mournful and solemn interest and silent approval. The aunt spoke to each of them in the same words, about their health and her own, and the health of Her Majesty, "who, thank God, was better today." And each visitor, though politeness prevented his showing impatience, left the old woman with a sense of relief at having performed a vexatious duty and did not return to her the whole evening.

It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

Nor mourn the unalterable Days That Genius goes and Folly stays.

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.

The Chinese are a great nation, incapable of permanent suppression by foreigners. They will not consent to adopt our vices in order to acquire military strength; but they are willing to adopt our virtues in order to advance in wisdom. I think they are the only people in the world who quite genuinely believe that wisdom is more precious than rubies. That is why the West regards them as uncivilized.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Natural selection is an extremely simple process, in the sense that very little machinery needs to be set up in order for it to work. Of course the effects and consequences of natural selection are complex in the extreme. But in order to set natural selection going on a real planet, all that is required is the existence of inherited information.

Where there is happiness, there is found pleasure in nonsense. The transformation of experience into its opposite, of the suitable into the unsuitable, the obligatory into the optional (but in such a manner that this process produces no injury and is only imagined in jest), is a pleasure; ...

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.

Every intrusion of the spirit that says, "I'm as good as you" into our personal and spiritual life is to be resisted just as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Hierarchy within can alone preserve egalitarianism without. Romantic attacks on democracy will come again. We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they. Human nature will not permanently endure flat equality if it is extended from its proper political field into the more real, more concrete fields within. Let us wear equality; but let us undress every night.

As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.

For this too is a very pleasant strand woven into the Cynic's pattern of life; he must needs be flogged like an ass, and while he is being flogged he must love the men who flog him, as though he were the father or brother of them all.

Our stubbornness is right, because we want to preserve the liberty which we have in Christ. Only by preserving our liberty shall we be able to retain the truth of the Gospel inviolate.

Man is a rational animal - so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents. Often paraphrased as "It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.

The fact is he made a prodigious blunder in commencing the attack, and now his only chance is to be silent and let people forget the exposure. I do not believe that in the whole history of science there is a case of any man of reputation getting himself into such a contemptible position.

Like literature, philosophy is not distinguished from other subjects by a specific approach to a subject-matter independent of it. Chemistry deals with chemicals, biology with life and astronomy with very large, very distant objects. Philosophy can boast no such definite subject-matter.

In all sectors of society there should be roughly equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly motivated and endowed. The expectations of those with the same abilities and aspirations should not be affected by their social class.

I want you to read the true system of the heart, drafted by a decent man and published under another name. I do not want you to be biased against good and useful books merely because a man unworthy of reading them has the audacity to call himself the Author.

No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

A great affliction of all Philistines is that idealities afford them no entertainment, but to escape from boredom they are always in need of realities.

Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.

A philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing: and even then it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said. And he has said only one thing because he has seen only one point: and at that it was not so much a vision as a contact...

If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.

Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.

Falsehood has a perennial spring.

Till women are more rationally educated, the progress in human virtue and improvement in knowledge must receive continual checks.

And thus Christianity is played in, Christendom. Artists in dramatic costumes make their appearance in artistic buildings-there really is no danger at all, anything but that: the teacher is a royal functionary, steadily promoted, making a career-and how he dramatically plays Christianity, in short, he plays comedy. He lectures about renunciation, but he himself is being steadily promoted; he teaches all that about despising worldly titles and rank, but he himself is making a career.

Understand then all of you, especially the young, that to want to impose an imaginary state of government on others by violence is not only a vulgar superstition, but even a criminal work. Understand that this work, far from assuring the well-being of humanity is only a lie, a more or less unconscious hypocrisy, camouflaging the lowest passions we possess.

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion? "Can a Scientific Community Be Stable?,"

The world is not divine sport, it is divine destiny. There is divine meaning in the life of the world, of man, of human persons, of you and of me. Creation happens to us, burns itself into us, recasts us in burning - we tremble and are faint, we submit. We take part in creation, meet the Creator, reach out to Him, helpers and companions.