God only pours out his light into the mind after having subdued the rebellion of the will by an altogether heavenly gentleness which charms and wins it.

[Jesus laughs as he watches his disciples offering a prayer to God before Passover.] Disciples: Why are you laughing at us? Jesus says that he is laughing not at them but at their strange idea of pleasing their God. Jesus to his disciples from the Judas. See "Jesus Laughed" and "Judas Saves: Why the lost gospel makes sense".

Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.

For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.

You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

The true Gospel has it that we are justified by faith alone, without the deeds of the Law.

Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, “You are gods” '? (34) If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken. (35) New King James Version John 10:34

Secrecy is an instrument of conspiracy; it ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government.

The reproduction of mankind is a great marvel and mystery. Had God consulted me in the matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them of clay, in the way Adam was fashioned.

The Geschick of being: a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why." It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound. But this "simply" is everything, the one, the only... The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play.

Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"

With respect to a true culture and manhood, we are essentially provincial still, not metropolitan, - mere Jonathans. We are provincial, because we do not find at home our standards, - because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth, - because we are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.

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.

Justice is what love looks like in public.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, research is the means of all learning, and ignorance is the end.

That a woman is presented as a teacher, as a prototype of piety, cannot amaze anyone who knows that piety or godliness is fundamentally womanliness. ... from a woman you learn concern for the one thing needful, from Mary, sister of Lazarus, who sat silent at Christ's feet with her heart's choice: the one thing needful.

My dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.

First of all, principles should be general. That is, it must be possible to formulate them without use of what would be intuitively recognized as proper names, or rigged definite descriptions.

Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom, and poisons itself.

Now, what is 'unrighteousness' in practice? It is in practice behavior of a kind disliked by the herd. By calling it unrighteousness, and by arranging an elaborate system of ethics around this conception, the herd justifies itself in wreaking punishment upon the objects of its own dislike, while at the same time, since the herd is righteous by definition, it enhances its own self-esteem at the very moment when it lets loose its impulse to cruelty. This is the psychology of lynching, and of the other ways in which criminals are punished. The essence of the conception of righteousness, therefore, is to afford an outlet for sadism by cloaking cruelty as justice.

The pleasures that give most joy are the ones that most rarely come.

Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.

I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them together.

Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control.

For in every country of the world, I believe, the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states, abusing the confidence of their subjects, have by degrees diminished the real quantity of metal, which had been originally contained in their coins.

Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied - as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels - that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

There has never been any custom, however useless it may become with changing conditions, that isn't clung to desperately simply because it is something old and familiar.

The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men.

What is really disturbing about The Name of the Rose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating, anti-totalitarain force of laughter, of ironic distance. Our thesis here is almost the exact opposite of the underlying premise of Eco's novel: in contemporary socities, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. Perhaps the greatest danger for totalitarianism is people who take ideology seriously.

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behaviour is a result of antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of imagination.

I, who have so much and so universally adored this [greek], "excellent mediocrity," 32 of ancient times, and who have concluded the most moderate measure the most perfect, shall I pretend to an unreasonable and prodigious old age?

Pyrrhus, when his friends congratulated to him his victory over the Romans under Fabricius, but with great slaughter of his own side, said to them, "Yes; but if we have such another victory, we are undone".

Though the principles of the banking trade may appear somewhat abstruse, the practice is capable of being reduced to strict rules. To depart upon any occasion from these rules, in consequence of some flattering speculation of extraordinary gain, is almost always extremely dangerous, and frequently fatal to the banking company which attempts it.

Hearken with your ears to these best counsels,Reflect upon them with illumined judgment.Let each one choose his creed with that freedom of choice each must have at great events.

The industrial peak of a people when its main concern is not yet gain, but rather to gain.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What! — by such narrow ways — ?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness.

My trade and my art is living.

The wreck of the Titanic functions as a sublime object: a positive, material object elevated to the status of the impossible Thing. And perhaps all the effort to articulate the metaphysical meaning of the Titanic is nothing but an attempt to escape this terrifying impact of the Thing, an attempt to domesticate the Thing by reducing it to its symbolic status, by providing it with a meaning. We usually say that the fascinating presence of a Thing obscures its meaning; here, the opposite is true: the meaning obscures the terrifying impact of its presence.

An ignorant doctor is the aide-de-camp of death.

Men looke not at the greatnesse of the evill past, but the greatnesse of the good to follow.

Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them; and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation.

The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold...The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.

All that time is lost which might be better employed.

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience.

The sense of justice and injustice is not deriv'd from nature, but arises artificially... from education, and human conventions.

With a malicious man carry on no conflict, and do not molest him in any way whatever.