I repair, then, fellow-citizens, to the post you have assigned me. With experience enough in subordinate offices to have seen the difficulties of this the greatest of all, I have learnt to expect that it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it.

The freedom of the 'everyday mind' consists rather in not kneeling down in awe. Its mental attitude is better expressed as sitting unmoveable like an object.

To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.

The superior man has three things in which he delights, and to be ruler over the kingdom is not one of them. That his father and mother are both alive, and that the condition of his brothers affords no cause for anxiety;-this is one delight. That, when looking up, he has no occasion for shame before Heaven, and, below, he has no occasion to blush before men;-this is a second delight. That he can get from the whole kingdom the most talented individuals, and teach and nourish them;-this is the third delight.

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

"We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito."

When the end comes, you will be esteemed by the world and rewarded by God, not because you have won the love and respect of the princes of the earth, however powerful, but rather for having loved, defended and cherished one such as I ... what you receive from others is a testimony to their virtue; but all that you do for others is the sign and clear indication of your own.

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

He who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave.

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of lèse-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party, who are content when they have enough.

Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, 'If science can't do something, therefore religion can'.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.

To understand how indirect communication is possible we must grasp what it is about ordinary communication that is being changed.

Wyman's overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes.

The error arises from the learned jurists deceiving themselves and others, by asserting that government is not what it really is, one set of men banded together to oppress another set of men, but, as shown by science, is the representation of the citizens in their collective capacity.

The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.

What, could ye not watch with me one hour? Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it.

And neither ought we to be surprised by the affirmation that the consciousness of the Universe is composed and integrated by the consciousnesses of the beings which form the Universe, by the consciousnesses of all the beings that exist, and that nevertheless it remains a personal consciousness distinct from those which compose it. Only thus is it possible to understand how in God we live, move, and have our being.

Savage - There is only one way fit for a man - Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.

You must learn all things, both the unshaken heart of persuasive truth, and the opinions of mortals in which there is no true warranty.

My own view is that philosophy at its best has always, in every period, included some philosophers who brilliantly represent the moral face of the subject and some philosophers who brilliantly represent the theoretical face, as well as some geniuses whose insights span and unite both sides of the subject. To renounce either the moral ambitions of philosophy or its theoretical ambitions is not just to kill the subject of philosophy; it is to commit intellectual and spiritual suicide.

A speech comes alive only if it rises from the heart, not if it floats on the lips.

Happiness is the free play of the instincts, and so is youth.

There is only one thing that can form a bond between men, and that is gratitude...we cannot give someone else greater power over us than we have ourselves.

Let the modern eye look earnestly on that old midnight hour in St. Edmundsbury Church, shining yet on us, ruddy-bright, through the depths of seven hundred years; and consider mournfully what our Hero-worship once was, and what it now is!

If a man is mistaken, instruct him kindly and show him his error. But if thou art not able, blame thyself, or blame not even thyself.

I cannot conceive, how a body, destitute of understanding and sense, truly so called, can moderate and determine its own motions; especially so as to make them conformable to laws that it has no knowledge of.

In a general way, the literature of the twentieth century is essentially psychological; and psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man.

This aristocratic thesis is... the demos, the people, are the most numerous... also comprised of the most ordinary, and... even the worst, citizens. Therefore... what is best for the demos cannot be what is best for the polis... the city.

To-day unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound; Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!

I assert, that the ancient Whigs held doctrines, totally different from those I have last mentioned. I assert, that the foundations laid down by the Commons, on the trial of Doctor Sacheverel, for justifying the revolution of 1688, are the very same laid down in Mr. Burke's Reflections; that is to say,-a breach of the original contract, implied and expressed in the constitution of this country, as a scheme of government fundamentally and inviolably fixed in King, Lords, and Commons.-That the fundamental subversion of this antient constitution, by one of its parts, having been attempted, and in effect accomplished, justified the Revolution. That it was justified only upon the necessity of the case; as the only means left for the recovery of that antient constitution, formed by the original contract of the British state; as well as for the future preservation of the same government. These are, the points to be proved.

High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

Love with delight discourses in my mind Upon my lady's admirable gifts...Beyond the range of human intellect.

His reputation will go on increasing because scarcely anyone reads him.

Brutes are merely brutal; men and women are capable of being devils and lunatics. They are no less capable of being fully human-even, occasionally, of being a bit more than fully human, of being saints, heroes and geniuses.

Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.

All sources of energy upon which industry depends are wasted when they are employed; and industry is expending them at a continually increasing rate. Already coal has been largely replaced by oil, and oil is being used up so fast that East and West alike conceive it necessary to their own prosperity to destroy the industry of the other. And what is true of oil is equally true of other natural resources. Every day, many square miles of forest are turned into newspaper, but there is no known process by which newspaper can be turned into forest. You will say that this need not worry us, since newspapers will be replaced by radio, but radio requires electricity, electricity requires power, and power depends upon raw materials.

The public use of a man's reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment among men...

The facts of science, as they appeared to him [Heraclitus], fed the flame in his soul, and in its light, he saw into the depths of the world.

Start with a planet like the earth, with a complement of simple compounds bound to exist upon it, add the energy of a nearby sun, and you are bound to end with nucleic acids. You can't avoid it.

Precisely as an enigma, the symptom, so to speak, announces its dissolution through interpretation: the aim of psychoanalysis is to re-establish the broken network of communication by allowing the patient to verbalize the meaning of his symptom: through this verbalization the symptom is automatically dissolved. This, then is the basic point: in its very construction, the symptom implies the field of the big Other as consistent, complete, because its very function is an appeal to the Other which contains its meaning.