Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky. If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer.

The saying that beauty is but skin deep is but a skin-deep saying.

Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom.

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.

The propositions which are true and evident must of necessity be employed even by those who contradict them.

The ancient Egyptians had a superstitious antipathy to the sea; a superstition nearly of the same kind prevails among the Indians; and the Chinese have never excelled in foreign commerce.

He was arrested twice; he was taken in 1922 for a midnight interrogation with Dzerjinsky; Kamenev was also there. ... But Berdyaev did not humiliate himself, he did not beg, he firmly professed the moral and religious principles by virtue of which he did not adhere to the party in power; and not only did they judge that there was no point in putting him on trial, but he was freed. Now there is a man who had a "point of view"!

There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

"It is necessary to be given the prop that all elementary props are given." This is not necessary because it is even impossible. There is no such prop! That all elementary props are given is SHOWN by there being none having an elementary sense which is not given.

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.

Fear not, then, thou child infirm, There's no god dare wrong a worm.

Resignation as to knowledge of the world is for me not an irretrievable plunge into a scepticism which leaves us to drift about in life like a derelict vessel. I see in it that effort of honesty which we must venture to make in order to arrive at the serviceable world-view which hovers within sight. Every world-view which fails to start from resignation in regard to knowledge is artificial and a mere fabrication, for it rests upon an inadmissible interpretation of the universe.

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

Besides, he who follows another not only discovers nothing but is not even investigating.

One day, observing a child drinking out of his hands, he cast away the cup from his wallet with the words, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living."

I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.

If it is pleasing to observe in nature her desire to paint God in all his works, in which we see some traces of him because they are his images, how much more just is it to consider in the productions of minds the efforts which they make to imitate the essential truth, even in shunning it, and to remark wherein they attain it and wherein they wander from it, as I have endeavored to do in this study.

The most profound reason... why the metropolis conduces to the urge for the most individual personal existence... appears to me to be the following: the development of modern culture is characterized by the preponderance of what one may call the "objective spirit" over the "subjective spirit."

As for me, when you want a good laugh, you will find me in fine state... fat and sleek, a true hog of Epicurus' herd.

Everything is in a state of metamorphosis. Thou thyself art in everlasting change and in corruption to correspond; so is the whole universe.

When I walk along with two others, they may serve me as my teachers. I will select their good qualities and follow them, their bad qualities and avoid them.

Out of love, God becomes man. He says: Here you see what it is to be a human being; but he adds: Take care, for I am also God - blessed is he who takes no offense at me. 

There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible.

I am looking forward very much to getting back to Cambridge, and being able to say what I think and not to mean what I say: two things which at home are impossible. Cambridge is one of the few places where one can talk unlimited nonsense and generalities without anyone pulling one up or confronting one with them when one says just the opposite the next day.

The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.

When I found myself regarded as respectable, I began to wonder what sins I had committed. I must be very wicked, I thought. I began to engage in the most uncomfortable introspection. Interview with Irwin Ross, September 1957;If there were a God, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt his existence.

With an ignorant man thou shouldst not become a confederate and associate.

I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it.

Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party - however numerous they may be - is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of "justice" but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when "freedom" becomes a special privilege.

In some lyceums they tell me that they have voted to exclude the subject of religion. But how do I know what their religion is, and when I am near to or far from it? I have walked into such an arena and done my best to make a clean breast of what religion I have experienced, and the audience never suspected what I was about.

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.

The contradictory conceptual couple, identity and difference, is not the adequate framework for understanding the organization of the multitude. Instead we are a multiplicity of singular forms of life and at the same time share a common global existence. The anthropology of the multitude is an anthropology of singularity and commonality.

Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

Bear no improper envy, so that thy life may not become tasteless.

Count all wickedness foreign and alien.

Whereas the particular conception of ideology designates only a part of the opponent's assertions as ideologies - and this only with reference to their content, the total conception calls into question the opponent's total Weltanschauung (including his conceptual apparatus), and attempts to understand these concepts as an outgrowth of the collective life of which he partakes.

The Indian teaching, through its clouds of legends, has yet a simple and grand religion, like a queenly countenance seen through a rich veil. It teaches to speak truth, love others, and to dispose trifles. The East is grand - and makes Europe appear the land of trifles .... all is soul and the soul is Vishnu ... cheerful and noble is the genius of this cosmogony. Hari is always gentle and serene - he translates to heaven the hunter who has accidentally shot him in his human form, he pursues his sport with boors and milkmaids at the cow pens; all his games are benevolent and he enters into flesh to relieve the burdens of the world.

Man has three ways of acting wisely. First, on meditation; that is the noblest. Secondly, on imitation; that is the easiest. Thirdly, on experience; that is the bitterest.

Ancient philosophy will always hold its own among those who are worthy to judge it, because it forms... a system that is solid and well articulated like the body, whereas all these scattered members of modern philosophy form no system.

When a reasonable Soul forsaketh his divine nature, and becometh beast-like, it dieth. For though the substance of the Soul be incorruptible: yet, lacking the use of Reason, it is reputed dead; for it loseth the Intellective Life.

I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth, which God forms with the explicit intention of making it as much as possible like us.

At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.