Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came the human beings, they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.

In this life it is necessary that we be on our guard. To begin with we must be constantly aware of the fact that life here below is best described as being a type of continual warfare. This is a fact that Job, that undefeated soldier of vast experience, tells us so plainly. Yet in this matter the great majority of mankind is often deceived, for the world, like some deceitful magician, captivates their minds with seductive blandishments, and as a result most individuals behave as if there had been a cessation of hostilities.

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

But ordinary language is all right.

I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time - a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment... only to vanish forever.

All is ephemeral - fame and the famous as well.

The function of knowledge in the decision-making process is to determine which consequences follow upon which of the alternative strategies.

Ignorance is the mother of Devotion: A maxim that is proverbial, and confirmed by general experience. Look out for a people, entirely destitute of religion: If you find them at all, be assured, that they are but few degrees removed from brutes. What so pure as some of the morals, included in some theological system? What so corrupt as some of the practices, to which these systems give rise?

He who feared that he would not succeed sat still.

All presentation, all demonstration-and the presentation of thought is demonstration-has, according to its original determination-and this is all that matters to us-the cognitive activity of the other person as its ultimate aim.

Till mankind be satisfied with the naked statement of what they really perceive, till they confess virtue to be then most illustrious, when she more disdains the aid of ornament, they will never arrive at that manly justice of sentiment at which they seem destined one day to arrive. By his scheme of naked virtue will be every day a gainer; every succeeding observer willl more fully do her justice, while vice, deprived of that varnish with which she delighted to glow her actions of that gaudy exhibition which may be made alike by every pretender will speedily sink into unheeded contempt.

Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.

Neoconservatives believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support. ..."War" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world.

I might try to save the view that 'future contingents' have no truth value by saying that even present-tense statements have no truth value if they refer to the outcome of events that are so far away that a causal signal informing me of the outcome could not have reached me-now without traveling faster than light. In other words, I might attempt saying that statements about events that are in neither the upper half nor the lower half of my light-cone have no truth value. In addition, statements about events in the upper half of my light-cone have no truth value, since they are in my future according to every coordinate system. So only statements about events in the lower half of my light-cone have a truth value; only events that are in 'my past* according to all observers are determined.

The first promise exchanged by two beings of flesh was at the foot of a rock that was crumbling into dust; they took as witness for their constancy a sky that is not the same for a single instant; everything changed in them and around them, and they believed their hearts free of vicissitudes. O children! always children!

Being a planetary citizen does not need space travel. It means being conscious that we are part of the universe and of the earth. The most fundamental law is to recognise that we share the planet with other beings, and that we have a duty to care for our common home.

The United States has been in a long term decline, with its political institutions decaying. ...The single source of that decline is ...the pervasive polarization ...within American society that has made the United States unable to meet some of the basic governance challenges that it has faced. The most recent example... has been the COVID pandemic... Wearing a mask, instead of becoming a health measure that people take to protect themselves and their loved ones, becomes as political statement... You don't wear a mask if you're a Trump supporter, and you do... if you're a Democrat. This is... not the way that... coherent nations... meet systemic challenges like a global pandemic.

To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad. On the proposition that the volume generated by revolving the region under 1/x from 1 to infinity has finite volume.

Assist a man in raising a burden; but do not assist him in laying it down.

And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.

The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.

You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.

You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!

Yet with every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how any mortal ever could consider this Koran as a Book written in Heaven, too good for the Earth; as a well-written book, or indeed as a book at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody; written, so far as writing goes, as badly as almost any book ever was!

Those who were best able to provide themselves with the means of security against their neighbors, being thus in possession of the surest guarantee, passed the most agreeable life in each other's society; and their enjoyment of the fullest intimacy was such that, if one of them died before his time, the survivors did not mourn his death as if it called for sympathy.

Staying as I am, one foot in one country and the other in another, I find my condition very happy, in that it is free.

Whatever you see in the more material part of yourself, learn to refer to God and to the invisible part of yourself. In that way, whatever offers itself to the senses will become for you an occasion for the practice of piety.

Remember, however, before all else, to strip things of all that disturbs and confuses, and to see what each is at bottom; you will then comprehend that they contain nothing fearful except the actual fear.

Do not despair: one thief was saved. Do not presume: one thief was damned.

Of war men ask the outcome, not the cause.

Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people, is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it.

If any ask me what a free Government is, I answer, that, for any practical purpose, it is what the people think so, - and that they, and not I, are the natural, lawful, and competent judges of this matter.

And this is the vote which [Cato] casts concerning them both: "If Caesar wins, I slay myself; if Pompey, I go into exile." What was there for a man to fear who, whether in defeat or in victory, had assigned to himself a doom which might have been assigned to him by his enemies in their utmost rage? So he died by his own decision.

The man of principles has character. Of him we know definitely what to expect. He does not act on the basis of his instinct, but on the basis of his will. Therefore, without being redundant one can classify characteristics according to a person's faculty of desire (what is practical), as a) his nature, or natural talent, b) his temperament, or disposition, and c) his general character, or mode of thinking.

Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents. ... So long as antimilitarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situation. And as a rule they do fail. The duties, penalties, and sanctions pictured in the utopias they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military-minded.

The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

The standard that I always come back to is the health of the world, which is the same as our own personal health. We can't distinguish our health from the health of everything else. And we know enough from the ecologists now to know that health is a very complex and un-understandable complexity of relationships that makes the world whole.

There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to "get culture" or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.

If there is a state, then necessarily there is domination and consequently slavery. A state without slavery, open or camouflaged, is inconceivable - that is why we are enemies of the state.

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mould.... The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbour causes a war betwixt princes.

A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.

Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things.

It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.

The necessity of speaking, the predicament of having nothing to say, and the desire for tact are three things that can turn the greatest man into a laughingstock.