The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.

Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.

To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.

The reservedness and distance that fathers keep, often deprive their sons of that refuge which would be of more advantage to them than an hundred rebukes or chidings.

There is no one at the Communion table who retains against you even the least of your sins, no one, unless you yourself do it. So cast them away from yourself, and the recollection of them, lest in it your retain them; and cast the recollection of your having cast your sins away, lest in it you retain them.

The World and Life are one. Physiological life is of course not "Life". And neither is psychological life. Life is the world. Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic. Ethics and Aesthetics are one.

This grave dissociation of past and present is the generic fact of our time and the cause of the suspicion, more or less vague, which gives rise to the confusion characteristic of our present-day existence. We feel that we actual men have suddenly been left alone on the earth; that the dead did not die in appearance only but effectively; that they can no longer help us. Any remains of the traditional spirit have evaporated. Models, norms, standards are no use to us. We have to solve our problems without any active collaboration of the past, in full actuality, be they problems of art, science, or politics. The European stands alone, without any living ghosts by his side; like Peter Schlehmil he has lost his shadow. This is what always happens when midday comes.

Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word Liberty entire nations.

...the competition of the poor takes away from the reward of the rich.

Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up.

When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.

Cato requested old men not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age, which was accompanied with many other evils.

But men must know that in this theater of man's life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one - particularly if he plays golf, which he usually does.

The science which has to do with nature clearly concerns itself for the most part with bodies and magnitudes and their properties and movements, but also with the principles of this sort of substance, as many as they may be.

It is easy to see that the existing generation are conspiring with a beneficence, which, in its working for coming generations, sacrifices the passing one, which infatuates the most selfish men to act against their private interest for the public welfare. We build railroads, we know not for what or for whom; but one thing is certain, that we who build will receive the very smallest share of benefit. Benefit will accrue; they are essential to the country, but that will be felt not until we are no longer countrymen. We do the like in all matters: - 'Man's heart the Almighty to the Future setBy secret and inviolable springs.'

Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.

We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. (He is already on the way; he is like Mohammed. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with a wild god.)

Though the principles of the banking trade may appear somewhat abstruse, the practice is capable of being reduced to strict rules. To depart upon any occasion from these rules, in consequence of some flattering speculation of extraordinary gain, is almost always extremely dangerous, and frequently fatal to the banking company which attempts it.

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

In reality, the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital.

It is an odd circumstance that neither the old nor the new, by itself, is interesting; the absolutely old is insipid; the absolutely new makes no appeal at all. The old in the new is what claims the attention,-the old with a slightly new turn.

What are you waiting for in order to give up?

We tend to believe the premises because we can see that their consequences are true, instead of believing the consequences because we know the premises to be true. But the inferring of premises from consequences is the essence of induction; thus the method in investigating the principles of mathematics is really an inductive method, and is substantially the same as the method of discovering general laws in any other science.

America spends more on healthcare while covering fewer people because of administrative bloat. Insurance companies, billing departments, claims processors - parasitic industries extracting profit from sickness. Single-payer would eliminate waste, but someone profits from inefficiency.

Anxiety and nothing always correspond to each other. As soon as the actuality of freedom and of spirit is posited, anxiety is canceled. But what then does the nothing of anxiety signify more particularly in paganism. This is fate. Fate is a relation to spirit as external. It is the relation between spirit and something else that is not spirit and to which fate nevertheless stands in a spiritual relation. Fate may also signify exactly the opposite, because it is the unity of necessity and accidental. ... A necessity that is not conscious of itself is eo ipso the accidental in relation to the next moment. Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

The concept of justice I take to be defined, then, by the role of its principles in assigning rights and duties and in defining the appropriate division of social advantages. A conception of justice is an interpretation of this role.

But though there be naturally a wide difference in point of delicacy between one person and another, nothing tends further to encrease and improve this talent, than practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty.

Education to true religion is the final task of the new education.

To conceive a thought - just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.

Just as the witticism brings two very different real objects under one concept, the pun brings two different concepts, by the assistance of accident, under one word.

The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.

"Milton was right," said my Teacher. "The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words 'Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery."

The origin of our passions, the root and spring of all the rest, the only one which is born with man, which never leaves him as long as he lives, is self-love; this passion is primitive, instinctive, it precedes all the rest, which are in a sense only modifications of it. In this sense, if you like, they are all natural. But most of these modifications are the result of external influences, without which they would never occur, and such modifications, far from being advantageous to us, are harmful. They change the original purpose and work against its end; then it is that man finds himself outside nature and at strife with himself.

You can live, provided you live; that is, you can live for ever, provided you live a good life.

I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.

There is no need to worry about mere size. We do not necessarily respect a fat man more than a thin man. Sir Isaac Newton was very much smaller than a hippopotamus, but we do not on that account value him less.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.

It is ...easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.

Many, and I think the determining, constitutive facts remain outside the reach of the operational concept. And by virtue of this limitation-this methodological injunction against transitive concepts which might show the facts in their true light and call them by their true name-the descriptive analysis of the facts blocks the apprehension of facts and becomes an element of the ideology that sustains the facts. Proclaiming the existing social reality as its own norm, this sociology fortifies in the individuals the "faithless faith" in the reality whose victims they are.

The homosexual never thinks of himself when someone is branded in his presence with the name homosexual. ...His sexual tastes will doubtless lead him to enter into relationships with this suspect category, but he would like to make use of them without being likened to them. Here, too, the ban that is cast on certain men by society has destroyed all possibility of reciprocity among them. Shame isolates.

Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.

I cannot get from the nature of the proposition to the individual logical operations!!! That is, I cannot bring out how far the proposition is the picture of the situation. I am almost inclined to give up all my efforts.