No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. First line.

Apollo said that every one's true worship was that which he found in use in the place where he chanced to be.

Revolution is like the daughters of Pelias: it cuts humanity to pieces in order to rejuvenate it.

My doubt goes like this: How could the Loving One have the heart to let human beings become so guilty that they got his murder on their consciences?

The will is a unity of two different aspects or moments: first, the individual's ability to abstract from every specific condition and, by negating it, to return to the absolute liberty of the pure ego; secondly, the individual's act of freely adopting a concrete condition, freely affirming his existence as a particular, limited ego.

For his the artist's life is, of necessity, full of conflicts, since two forces fight in him: the ordinary man with his justified claim for happiness, contentment, and guarantees for living on the one hand, and the ruthless creative passion on the other, which under certain conditions crushes all personal desires into the dust.

The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude - as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only by sucking off the blood of the living.

The capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers.

This world, the whole of the planet called earth, is the common country of all who live and breathe upon it.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

The guillotine takes life almost without touching the body, just as prison deprives of liberty or a fine reduces wealth. It is intended to apply the law not so to a real body capable of feeling pain as to a juridical subject, the possessor, among other rights, of the right to exist it had to have the abstraction of the law itself.

One should oppose the fascination with Hitler according to which Hitler was, of course, a bad guy, responsible for the death of millions — but he definitely had balls, he pursued with iron will what he wanted. … This point is not only ethically repulsive, but simply wrong: no, Hitler did not ‘have the balls’ to really change things; he did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, i.e., he acted so that nothing would really change, he stages a big spectacle of Revolution so that the capitalist order could survive.”
In this precise sense of violence, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler: Gandhi’s movement effectively endeavored to interrupt the basic functioning of the British colonial state.

There is no disease so destructive as lust.

Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.

In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible. It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder. Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.

Though he made a joke when asked to do the right thing, he always did it. He was so much more in earnest than he appeared. He did not do himself justice.

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.

For the history of the centuries that have passed since the birth of Christ nowhere reveals conditions like those of the present. There has never been such building and planting in the world. There has never been such gluttonous and varied eating and drinking as now. Wearing apparel has reached its limit in costliness. Who has ever heard of such commerce as now encircles the earth? There have arisen all kinds of art and sculpture, embroidery and engraving, the like of which has not been seen during the whole Christian era. In addition men are so delving into the mysteries of things that today a boy of twenty knows more than twenty doctors formerly knew.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. ... The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

The foundation of all technology is fire.

The oppression of a majority by a minority, and the demoralization inevitably resulting from it, is a phenomenon that has always occupied me and has done so most particularly of late.

To be content with life - or to live merrily, rather - all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.

Too little liberty brings stagnation, and too much brings chaos.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them?

Every one knows that there are no real forests in England. The deer in the parks of the great are demurely domestic cattle, fat as London alderman.

To have been a Sovereign, yet the champion of liberty,-a revolutionary leader, yet the supporter of social order, is the peculiar glory of William. Till his accession the British Constitution was in its Chaos. It had contained, from a very remote period, the simple elements of an harmonious government. But they were in a state not of amalgamation, but of conflict,-not of equilibrium but of alternate elevation and depression. The tyranny of Charles the first produced civil war and anarchy. Tyranny had now again produced resistance and revolution. And, but for the wisdom of the new King, it seems probable that the same cycle of misery would have been again described.

The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a confidence in His declarations, and in imitation of His perfections.

We have here a question of difficulty, analogous to the question of nominalism and realism.

Absolute relativism, which is neither more nor less than skepticism, in the most modern sense of the term, is the supreme triumph of the reasoning reason.

Marriage is a union between two persons - one man and one woman. A woman who has given herself up to one, can not give herself up to a second, for her whole dignity requires that she should belong only to this one.

The proper study of mankind is books.

No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.

Surrender of individuality by the many to someone who is taken to be a superindividual explains the retrograde movement of society. Dictatorships and totalitarian states, and belief in the inevitability of this or that result coming to pass are, strange as it may sound, ways of denying the reality of time and the creativeness of the individual.

Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition - as we shall see, the two come to the same thing - the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor. But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life.

Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.

Some say that the body is the "tomb" of the soul, their notion being that the soul is buried in the present life; and again, because by its means the soul gives any signs which it gives, it is for this reason also properly called "sign". But I think it most likely that the Orphic poets gave this name, with the idea that the soul is undergoing punishment for something; they think it has the body as an enclosure to keep it safe, like a prison, and this is, as the name itself denotes, the "safe" for the soul, until the penalty is paid, and not even a letter needs to be changed.

The slaves of our times are not all those factory and workshop hands only who must sell themselves completely into the power of the factory and foundry-owners in order to exist, but nearly all the agricultural laborers are slaves, working, as they do, unceasingly to grow another's corn on another's field, and gathering it into another's barn; or tilling their own fields only in order to pay to bankers the interest on debts they cannot get rid of. And slaves also are all the innumerable footmen, cooks, porters, housemaids, coachmen, bathmen, waiters, etc., who all their life long perform duties most unnatural to a human being, and which they themselves dislike.

Nowadays, to say that we are clever animals is not to say something philosophical and pessimistic but something political and hopeful - namely, if we can work together, we can make ourselves into whatever we are clever and courageous enough to imagine ourselves becoming. This is to set aside Kant's question "What is man?" and to substitute the question "What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?"

Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure-Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure.Such pleasures seek if private be thy end:If it be public, wide let them extend.Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view:If pains must come, let them extend to few.

Positivism ... implies the double falsehood that no interpretation is needed, and that it is not needed because the story which the positivist writer tells, such as it is, is obvious. The story he or she tells is usually a bad one, and its being obvious only means that it is familiar.

It is the privilege of true genius, and certainly of the genius that opens a new road, to make without punishment great mistakes.

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'