"These Macedonians," said he, "are a rude and clownish people, that call a spade a spade."

It was my wish to present this great subject as an illustration of the itermingling of philosophical, mathematical, and physical thought, a study which is dear to my heart. This could be done only by building up the theory systematically from the foundations, and by restricting attention throughout to the principles. But I have not been able to satisfy these self-imposed requirements: the mathematician predominates at the expense of the philosopher.

Instead of defining the word, let us briefly characterize or describe the phenomenon. Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite.

The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy.

If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.

What chance has Vulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them.

Even atheists rebel and express, like Hardy and Housman, their rage against God although (or because) He does not, on their view, exist...

The order of nature cannot be justified by the mere observation of nature. For there is nothing in the present fact which inherently refers either to the past or to the future.... It illustrates the anti-rationalism of the scientific public that, when Hume did appear, it was only the religious implications of his philosophy which attracted attention. This was because the clergy were in principle rationalists, whereas the men of science were content with a simple faith in the order of nature.

The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.

Giving alms is only a virtuous deed when you give money that you yourself worked to get.

Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.

Catastrophic fatality abruptly switches over into salvation.

Prosperity makes friends, adversity tries them.

During such calm sunshine of the mind, these spectres of false divinity never make their appearance.

Nature admits no lie.

I write to thee on this subject, friend, because I am angry at a book which I have just left, which is so large, that it seems to contain universal science, but it hath almost split my head, without teaching me anything.

Our psychology is ... a science of mere phenomena without any metaphysical implications. [It] Treats all metaphysical claims and assertions as mental phenomena, and regards them as statements about the mind and its structure.

With this as its basic constitution, civilization achieved things of which gentile society was not even remotely capable. But it achieved them by setting in motion the lowest instincts and passions in man and developing them at the expense of all his other abilities. From its first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization; wealth and again wealth and once more wealth, wealth, not of society, but of the single scurvy individual-here was its one and final aim. If at the same time the progressive development of science and a repeated flowering of supreme art dropped into its lap, it was only because without them modern wealth could not have completely realized its achievements.

The percept takes priority of the concept.

The light will not shame you, if it shows you your own ugliness, and that ugliness so offends you that you perceive the beauty of the light.

Themistocles being asked whether he would rather be Achilles or Homer, said, "Which would you rather be,-a conqueror in the Olympic games, or the crier that proclaims who are conquerors?"

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.

For those who live inside a myth, it seems a self-evident fact. Human progress is a fact of this kind. If you accept it you have a place in the grand march of humanity. Humankind is, of course, not marching anywhere. 'Humanity' is a fiction composed from billions of individuals for each of whom life is singular and final. But the myth of progress is extremely potent. When it loses its power those who have lived by it are - as Conrad put it, describing Kayerts and Carlier - 'like those lifelong prisoners who, liberated after many years, do not know what use to make of their freedoms'. When faith in the future is taken from them, so is the image they have of themselves. If they then opt for death, it is because without that faith they can no longer make sense of living.

Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.

To be a Christian - a follower of Jesus Christ - is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom.

Our psychological experiences are all equally facts. There is nothing to choose between them. No psychological experience is "truer," so far as we are concerned, than any other. For even if one should correspond more closely to things in themselves as perceived by some hypothetical non-human being, it would be impossible for us to discover which it was. Science is no "truer" than common sense, or lunacy, or art, or religion. It permits us to organize our experience profitably; but tells us nothing about the real nature of the world to which our experiences are supposed to refer. From the internal reality, by which I mean the totality of psychological experiences, it actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences - the experiences of sense.

Who is this that cries from the ends of the earth? Who is this one man who reaches to the extremities of the universe? He is one, but that one is unity. He is one, not one in a single place, but the cry of this one man comes from the remotest ends of the earth. But how can this one man cry out from the ends of the earth, unless he be one in all?

Humans kill one another - and in some cases themselves - for many reasons, but none is more human than the attempt to make sense of their lives. More than the loss of life, they fear loss of meaning.

Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. Closing lines of the preface

When I speak of 'negative dialectics' not the least important reason for doing so is my desire to dissociate myself from this fetishization of the positive.

Other dogs bite only their enemies, whereas I bite also my friends in order to save them.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not.

He had no failings which were not owing to a noble cause; to an ardent, generous, perhaps an immoderate passion for fame; a passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

The distinction of Fact and Theory is only relative. Brute animals have a practical knowledge of relations of space and force; but they have no knowledge of Geometry or Mechanicks.

To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in undeserved sufferings.

Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

A good education would be devoted to encouraging and refining the love of the beautiful, but a pathologically misguided moralism instead turns such longing into a sin against the high goal of making everyone feel good, of overcoming nature in the name of equality. ... Love of the beautiful may be the last and finest sacrifice to radical egalitarianism.

There may be a rationalist who has never wavered in his conviction of the mortality of the soul, and there may be a vitalist who has never wavered in his faith in immortality; but at the most this would prove that just as there are natural monstrosities, so there are those who are stupid as regards heart and feeling, however great their intelligence, and those who are stupid intellectually, however great their virtue. But, in normal cases, I cannot believe those who assure me that never, not in a fleeting moment, not in the hours of direst loneliness and grief, has this murmur of uncertainty breathed upon their consciousness.

Be not swept off your feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, "Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you."

The soul was not made to dwell in a thing; and when forced to it, there is no part of that soul but suffers violence.

An eternal purgatory, then, rather than a heaven of glory; an eternal ascent. If there is an end to all suffering, however pure and spiritualized we may suppose it to be, if there is an end to all desire, what is it that makes the blessed in paradise go on living? If in paradise they do not suffer for want of God, how shall they love Him? And if there, in the heaven of glory, while they behold God little by little and closer and closer, yet without ever wholly attaining Him, there does not always remain something more for them to know and desire, if there does not always remain a substratum of doubt, how shall they not fall asleep?

If man reflects on the changes and transformations which follow one another like wave after wave and their rapidity, he will despise everything which is perishable.

At times the world sees straight, but many times the world goes astray.

Essentially, this war...is a great race-conflict, a conflict of Teuton and Slav, in which certain other nations, England, France and Belgium, have been led into cooperation with the Slav. ... The conflict of Germany and Russia has been produced not by this or that diplomatic incident, but by primitive passions expressing themselves in the temper of the two races.

And the central assertion of his philosophy is that this inner realm is the 'spiritual world' and that once man has learned to enter this realm, he realizes that it is not a mere imaginative reflection of the external world, but a world that possesses its own independent reality.