Democracies owe their existence to national loyalties - the loyalties that are supposedly shared by government and opposition, by all political parties, and by the electorate as a whole. Wherever the experience of nationality is weak or non-existent, democracy has failed to take root. For without national loyalty, opposition is a threat to government, and political disagreements create no common ground.

I believe that one can and must hope for a sane society that furthers man's capacity to love his fellow men, to work and create, to develop his reason and his objectivity of a sense of himself that is based on the experience of his productive energy. I believe that one can and must hope for the collective regaining of a mental health that is characterized by the capacity to love and to create...

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

Poetry must be new as foam, and as old as the rock.

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

In the state of nature, Profit is the measure of Right.

We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox.

If the slave-owner of our times has no slave, John, whom he can send to the cesspool, he has five shillings, of which hundreds of such Johns are in such need that the slave-owner of our times may choose any one out of hundreds of Johns and be a benefactor to him by giving him the preference, and allowing him, rather than another, to climb down into the cesspool.

In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.

Theologian: But what is to love? Philosopher: To be delighted by the happiness of another.

Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves; therefore the former make us universally popular, the latter unpopular.

He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

A large plural society cannot be governed without recognizing that, transcending its plural interests, there is a rational order with a superior common law.

In the Koran as in the Bible, politics is divinized, and human reason, crushed by the religious ascendancy, cannot insinuate its isolating and corrosive poison into the mechanisms of government, so that citizens are believers whose loyalty is exalted to faith, and obedience to enthusiasm and fanaticism.

Man must be free of it all, of his bad conscience and of the bad salvation from this conscience in order to become in truth the way. Now, he no longer promises others the fulfillment of his duties, but promises himself the fulfillment of man.

The tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the façade of objective rationality.

Is it not a noble farce, wherein kings, republics, and emperors have for so many ages played their parts, and to which the whole vast universe serves for a theatre?

All's well that ends well; which is the epitaph I should put on my tombstone if I were the last man left alive.

To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; the past reborn in the overflow of fragrances; the smell, through which we conquer time; the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; to deepen yourself in the intangible; to touch the world airborne by smell; aerial dialogue and gliding dissolution; to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation...

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Of course I base my characters partly on the people I know-one can't escape it-but fictional characters are oversimplified; they're much less complex than the people one knows.

The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to convince them in important matters. He would much rather invite contradiction, preferably in the form of rational and disciplined criticism. He seeks not to convince but to arouse - to challenge others to form free opinions.

I truly cannot say what the person who still has hope for man should think of the imminence of quasi-apocalyptic destruction. It would certainly force many to face the existential problem in all its nakedness, and subject them to extreme trials; but is this a worse evil than that of mankind's safe, secure, satisfied, and total consignment to the kind of happiness that befits Nietzsche's "last man": a comfortable consumer civilization of socialized human animals, aided by all the discoveries of science and industry and reproducing demographically in a squirming, catastrophic crescendo?

You worry whether the drought will end. It is far better that you pray that God may water your mind lest virtue wither away in it. You are greatly concerned with money that is lost or being wasted, or you worry about the advance of old age. I think it much to be desired that you provide first of all for the needs of your soul.

I said to the almond tree: "Speak to me of God."and the almond tree blossomed.

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but is it nothing more than the form of organization which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests.

Paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of a great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need.

Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.

In the old dramas it was love that had to be sacrificed to painful duty. In the modern instance the sacrifice is at the shrine of what William James called "the Bitch Goddess, Success." Love is to be abandoned for the stern pursuit of newspaper notoriety and dollars.

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

Penitence follows hasty decisions.

Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn, that lasts long enough to be worth naming. Or it may be a class of entities, such as rain drops, that come into existence at a sufficiently high rate to deserve a collective name, even if any one of them is short-lived.

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,- congestion of the brain, apoplexy, and strangulation.

Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them.

What a monstrous thing that a University should teach journalism! I thought that was only done at Oxford. This respect for the filthy multitude is ruining civilisation.

There ought to be system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark.

He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.

Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of Lamiae, bugbears to frighten children.

If we want a love which will protect the soul from wounds we must love something other than God.

What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.

...inversion...is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.

Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.