Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him.We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.

Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdain - under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core.

No man is bound by the words themselves, either to kill himselfe, or any other man.

Learn to ask of all actions, "Why are they doing that?" Starting with your own.

He was as great as a man can be without morality.

What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.

Parmenides: If anyone, with his mind fixed on all these objections and others like them, denies the existence of ideas of things, and does not assume an idea under which each individual thing is classed, he will be quite at a loss, since he denies that the idea of each thing is always the same, and in this way he will utterly destroy the power of carrying on discussion... Then what will become of philosophy? To what can you turn, if these things are unknown?

Thus every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.

Anybody interested in solving, rather than profiting from, the problems of food production and distribution will see that in the long run the safest food supply is a local food supply, not a supply that is dependent on a global economy. Nations and regions within nations must be left free - and should be encouraged - to develop the local food economies that best suit local needs and local conditions.

Americans must be the most sententious people in history. Far too busy to be religious, they have always felt that they sorely needed guidance.

In these days the angel of topology and the devil of abstract algebra fight for the soul of each individual mathematical domain.

Society triumphs over many. They wish to regenerate the world with their institutions, with their moral philosophy, with their love. Then they sink to living from breakfast till dinner, from dinner till tea, with a little worsted work, and to looking forward to nothing but bed. When shall we see a life full of steady enthusiasm, walking straight to its aim, flying home, as that bird is now, against the wind - with the calmness and the confidence of one who knows the laws of God and can apply them?

The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.

Poetry is the mysticism of mankind.

A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befal him must be from himself. He only can do himself any good or any harm. Nothing can be given to him or can taken from him but always there is a compensation.. There is a correspondence between the human soul and everything that exists in the world; more properly, everything that is known to man. Instead of studying things without the principles of them, all may be penetrated unto with him. Every act puts the agent in a new position. The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live the future as described to him but to live the real future to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man.

Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.

A mind that has confronted ruin for years Is half or more a ruined mind.

After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.

It is a consolation to the wretched to have companions in misery.

Wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy. The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates - in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition - that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital.

Let words proceed as they please, provided only your soul keeps its own sure order, provided your soul is great and holds unruffled to its ideals, pleased with itself on account of the very things which displease others, a soul that makes life the test of its progress, and believes that its knowledge is in exact proportion to its freedom from desire and its freedom from fear.

He wins every hand who mingles profit with pleasure, by delighting and instructing the reader at the same time.

As the Genesis story teaches, knowledge cannot save us from ourselves. If we know more than before, it means only that we have greater scope to enact our fantasies. But - as the Genesis myth also teaches - there is no way we can rid ourselves of what we know. If we try to regain a state of innocence, the result can only be a worse madness. The message of Genesis is that in the most vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle with our own nature.

There must be a seed of every good thing in the character of men, otherwise no one can bring it out. Lacking that, analogous motives, honor, etc., are substituted. Parents are in the habit of looking out for the inclinations, for the talents and dexterity, perhaps for the disposition of their children, and not at all for their heart or character.

The supreme maxim in scientific philosophising is this: wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.

The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity.

There is a science of Dynamics in man's fortunes and nature, as well as of Mechanics. There is a science which treats of, and practically addresses, the primary, unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character; as well as a science which practically addresses the finite, modified developments of these, when they take the shape of immediate "motives," as hope of reward, or as fear of punishment.

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

We give voice to our trivial cares, but suffer enormities in silence.

Foxes have their dens and birds have their nests, but human beings have no place to lay down and rest.

How can a rational being be ennobled by anything that is not obtained by its own exertions?

All agreed in rejecting that blasphemy, that Greece was ever a province of Asia, that the Greek spirit, so free, so objective, so limpid, could contain any element of the vague and obscure spirit of the Orient.

If it be said, that an Omnipotent Creator, though under no necessity of employing contrivances such as man must use, thought fit to use them in order to leave traces that would enable man to recognize his creative hand, the answer is that this equally implies a limit to his omnipotence. For if he wanted men to know that they themselves and the world are his work, he, being omnipotent, had only to will that they should be aware of it.

It is an uphill race, and a race against time, for if the American form of democracy overtakes us first, the majority will no more relax their despotism than a single despot would. But our only chance is to come forward as Liberals, carrying out the democratic idea, not as Conservatives, resisting it.

Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities - his preeminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.

Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.

Look within. Within is the fountain of the good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.

They have retired into the Judiciary as a stronghold. There the remains of federalism are to be preserved and fed from the Treasury; and from that battery all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down and erased.

Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

Love with delight discourses in my mind Upon my lady's admirable gifts...Beyond the range of human intellect.

We should desire neither the immortality nor the death of any human being, whoever he may be, with whom we have to do.

If human nature were unchangeable, as ignorant people still suppose it to be, the situation would indeed be hopeless.

It was an important moment. The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood, gave way. A new character came of the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began, with shadow play, faceless voices, impalpable entities. The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality.