Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up - painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other - that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.

All media are extensions of some human faculty -- psychic or physical.

If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse - a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.

Whatever moral rules you have deliberately proposed to yourself abide by them as they were laws, and as if you would be guilty of impiety by violating any of them. Don't regard what anyone says of you, for this, after all, is no concern of yours. How long, then, will you put off thinking yourself worthy of the highest improvements and follow the distinctions of reason? You have received the philosophical theorems, with which you ought to be familiar, and you have been familiar with them. What other master, then, do you wait for, to throw upon that the delay of reforming yourself?... Let whatever appears to be the best be to you an inviolable law.

Do you ask me whom I have conquered? Neither the Persians, nor the far-off Medes, nor any warlike race that lies beyond the Dahae; not these, but greed, ambition, and the fear of death that has conquered the conquerors of the world.

Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.

In all the areas of life where people have sought and found consolation through forbidding their desires-sex in particular, and taste in general-the habit of judgment is now to be stamped out.

Now, as the Word of God is the Son of God, so the love of God is the Holy Spirit.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world

Even when the wound is healed, the scar remains.

To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?

He who discommendeth others obliquely commendeth himself.

Humans kill one another - and in some cases themselves - for many reasons, but none is more human than the attempt to make sense of their lives. More than the loss of life, they fear loss of meaning.

[France is] a Country where the people, along with their political servitude, have thrown off the Yoke of Laws and morals.

Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings.

It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.

Propaganda:

Good = God (take a letter)
Evil = Devil (add a letter)

😁🚀📖

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

Be of good courage, and if you are discouraged, still take courage over against the various forms of nature. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection.

It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.

A fair exterior is a silent recommendation.

You're either excluding the right people or including the wrong people.

Quality leadership is neither the product of one great individual nor the result of odd historical accidents. Rather, it comes from deeply bred traditions and communities that shape and mold talented and gifted persons. Without a vibrant tradition of resistance passed on to new generations, there can be no nurturing of a collective and critical consciousness-only professional conscientiousness survives.

This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere-that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.

If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."

Scarcity is not a result of uneven endowments-that is diversity. Scarcity is having a mismatch between a culture and nature's giving. Cultures have evolved cultural diversity to mimic the biological diversity of climates and ecosystems. It's when that relationship is disrupted that you get unsustainable population growth.

Hegel ... proceeds abstractly from the pre-existence of the intellect. ... He does not appeal to the intellect within us.

Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence.

There are three juridical attributes that inseparably belong to the citizen by right. These are: Constitutional freedom, as the right of every citizen to have to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent or approval; Civil equality, as the right of the citizen to recognize no one as a superior among the people in relation to himself...; and Political independence, as the right to owe his existence and continuance in society not to the arbitrary will of another, but to his own rights and powers as a member of the commonwealth.

If things are deprived of memory, they become information or commodities. They are pushed into a time-free, ahistorical place.

Thus Mr. Sale informs me, the old Arab Tribes would gather in liveliest gaudeamus, and sing, and kindle bonfires, and wreathe crowns of honour, and solemnly thank the gods that, in their Tribe too, a Poet had shewn himself. As indeed they well might; for what usefuller, I say not nobler and heavenlier thing could the gods, doing their very kindest, send to any Tribe or Nation, in any time or circumstances?

The will is the living principle of the rational soul, is indeed itself reason, when purely and simply apprehended. That reason is itself active, means, that the pure will, as such, rules and is effectual. The infinite reason alone lies immediately and entirely in the purely spiritual order. The finite being lives necessarily at the same time in a sensuous order; that is to say, in one which presents to him other objects than those of pure reason; a material object, to be advanced by instruments and powers, standing indeed under the immediate command of the will, but whose efficacy is conditional also on its own natural laws.

The reason, however, why the philosopher may be likened to the poet is this: both are concerned with the marvellous.

We now live in a technologically prepared environment that blankets the earth itself. The humanly contrived environment of electric information and power has begun to take precedence over the old environment of "nature." Nature, as it were, begins to be the content of our technology.

Any ethics that needs religion is bad ethics, and any religion that tries to do so is bad religion. Of course, there are plenty of both around.

In so far as words are not used obviously to calculate technically relevant probabilities or for other practical purposes, ... they are in danger of being suspect as sales talk of some kind.

To give the monopoly of the home-market to the produce of domestic industry, in any particular art or manufacture, is in some measure to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, and must, in almost all cases, be either a useless or a hurtful regulation.

Religion, which should most distinguish us from the beasts, and ought most particularly elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts.

Step not beyond the beam of the balance.

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

To live without duties is obscene.

Thought must never submit, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, save to the facts themselves, because, for thought, submission would mean ceasing to be.

We are but numbers, born to consume resources.

It might have been supposed that the building of 30,000 miles of railways would have brought a measure of prosperity to India. But these railways were built not for India but for England; not for the benefit of the Hindu, but for the purposes of the British army and British trade... The railroads are entirely in European hands, and the Government refuse to appoint even one Hindu to the Railway Board. The railways lose money year after year, and are helped by the Government out of the revenues of the people. All the loses are borne by the people, all the gains are gathered by the trader.

My mind is calm, for my fortune is not my felicity. I know I have clean hands and a clean heart, and I hope a clean house for friends or servants; but Job himself, or whoever was the justest judge, by such hunting for matters against him as hath been used against me, may for a time seem foul, especially in a time when greatness is the mark and accusation is the game.