Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed.

By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

I do not admire myself as a person. My successes do not override my shortcomings.

After the battle in Pharsalia, when Pompey was fled, one Nonius said they had seven eagles left still, and advised to try what they would do. "Your advice," said Cicero, "were good if we were to fight jackdaws."

When we put our central nervous system outside us we returned to the primal nomadic state.

To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.

There is but a step between a proud man's glory and his disgrace.

The superior man honors his virtuous nature, and maintains constant inquiry and study, seeking to carry it out to its breadth and greatness, so as to omit none of the more exquisite and minute points which it embraces, and to raise it to its greatest height and brilliancy, so as to pursue the course of the Mean. He cherishes his old knowledge, and is continually acquiring new. He exerts an honest, generous earnestness, in the esteem and practice of all propriety. Thus, when occupying a high situation he is not proud, and in a low situation he is not insubordinate. When the kingdom is well governed, he is sure by his words to rise; and when it is ill governed, he is sure by his silence to command forbearance to himself.

There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

Whatever is supreme in a state, ought to have, as much as possible, its judicial authority so constituted as not only not to depend upon it, but in some sort to balance it. It ought to give a security to its justice against its power. It ought to make its judicature, as it were, something exterior to the state.

The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us.

Hitherto men have speculated vaguely on the unity of universes; it is now about to be demonstrated by reasoning from the passional world to material, guided by the analogy which exists between the two.

There are hardly any truths upon which we always remain agreed, and still fewer objects of pleasure which we do not change every hour, I do not know whether there is a means of giving fixed rules for adapting discourse to the inconstancy of our caprices.

Man is a sun and his senses are the planets.

But what is lawful for all extends across wide-ruling aether and, without cease, through endless sunshine.

For what is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?

I, for my part, do not conceive an act as having causes, and I consider myself satisfied when I have found in it not its 'factors' but the general themes which it organizes: for our decisions gather into new syntheses and on new occasions the leitmotif that governs our life

My poor opinion is, that the closest connexion between Great Britain and Ireland, is essential to the well being, I had almost said, to the very being, of the two Kingdoms. ... I think indeed that Great Britain would be ruined by the separation of Ireland; but, as there are degrees even in ruin, it would fall the most heavily on Ireland. By such a separation Ireland would be the most completely undone Country in the world; the most wretched, the most distracted and, in the end, the most desolate part of the habitable Globe.

I don't say it was deliberate fraud. He was probably madly sincere, and sincerely mad.

What J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were to the Age of Robber Barons, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett, as well as digital moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are to the contemporary age of the rule of the 1%. Then as now, the super-rich used governments to write laws and rules to allow them to accumulate unlimited wealth; then as now, creating monopolies by enclosing the commons and killing competition is the strategy for becoming the 1%.

Suffering exists only because it was good for our genes. Conditionally-activated negative emotions were fitness-enhancing in the ancestral environment. In the current era, apologists for mental pain are serving as the innocent mouthpieces of the nasty bits of code which spawned them.

The best people renounce all for one goal, the eternal fame of mortals; but most people stuff themselves like cattle. For what sense or understanding have they? They follow minstrels and take the multitude for a teacher, not knowing that many are bad and few good. For the best men choose one thing above all immortal glory among mortals; but the masses stuff themselves like cattle.

He is dead, and my hatred has died with him.

We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a future at all.

Raise your eyes and count the small gang of your oppressors who are only strong through the blood they suck from you and through your arms which you lend them unwillingly.

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe - "That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

From any vocabulary of ideas we can build other ideas by formal combinations of signs. But not any set of ideas will be instructive. One must have the right ideas.

The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.

Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.

Kant stated that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge to make room for faith," but all he had "denied" was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.

When we observe a thing, we see too much in it, we fall under the spell of the wealth of empirical detail which prevents us from clearly perceiving the notional determination which forms the core of the thing. The problem is thus not that of how to grasp the multiplicity of determinations, but rather to abstract from them, how to constrain our gaze and teach it to grasp only the notional determinism.

One should attend to one's enemies, for they are the first persons to detect one's errors.

You will die, not because you are ill, but because you are alive; even when you have been cured, thesame end awaits you; when you have recovered, it will be not death, but ill health, that you have escaped.

Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?

The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.

An empire derives no advantage from the caresses of two turtledoves who spend a year cooing to each other in public meetings.

Seek first God's Kingdom, that is, become like the lilies and the birds, become perfectly silent - then shall the rest be added unto you.

Why not? What is to hinder this Samson from governing? There is in him what far transcends all apprenticeships; in the man himself there exists a model of governing, something to govern by! There exists in him a heart-abhorrence of whatever is incoherent, pusillanimous, unveracious,-that is to say, chaotic, _un_governed; of the Devil, not of God. A man of this kind cannot help governing! He has the living ideal of a governor in him; and the incessant necessity of struggling to unfold the same out of him.

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

For the Supernatural, entering a human soul, opens to it new possibilities both of good and evil. From that point the road branches: one way to sanctity, love, humility, the other to spiritual pride, self-righteousness, persecuting zeal. And no way back to the mere humdrum virtues and vices of the unawakened soul. If the Divine call does not make us better, it will make us very much worse. Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God.