Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

The book written against fame and learning has the author's name on the title-page.

But the individual butterfly or earthquake remains just the unique existence which it is. We forget in explaining its occurrence that it is only the occurrence that is explained, not the thing itself.

I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle-classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men; I am both glad and proud of having done so. Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life-many an hour, which else would have been wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette; proud, because thus I got an opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men who with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, yet command the respect of every one but an English money-monger.

Human rights are not just cultural or legal constructions, as fashionable western relativists are fond of claiming. They are universal values. To deny the benefits of the new regime of rights to other cultures is to patronise them in a way that is reminiscent of the colonial era. If the new regime on torture is good enough for the US, who can say that it is not good for everyone?

It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would be almost easy to live. And M. Sartre's hero does not perhaps give us the real meaning of his anguish when he insists on those aspects of man he finds repugnant, instead of basing his reasons for despair on certain of man's signs of greatness. The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.

The city no longer exists except as a cultural ghost for tourists. Any highway eatery with its TV set, newspaper and magazine is as cosmopolitan as New York or Paris.

I ... understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has primarily to do with distractions ... Women's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life or saintly life.

Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.

Language is a form of organized stutter.

It is sometimes difficult to avoid the impression that there is a sort of foreknowledge of the coming series of events.

To desire friendship is a great fault. Friendship should be a gratuitous joy like those afforded by art or life. We must refuse it so that we may be worthy to receive it; it is of the order of grace.

The Law of conservation of energy tells us we can't get something for nothing, but we refuse to believe it.

All that is harmony for you, my Universe, is in harmony with me as well. Nothing that comes at the right time for you is too early or too late for me. Everything is fruit to me that your seasons bring, Nature. All things come of you, have their being in you, and return to you.

I would take to be quite a fool any man who would make a book full of laws and statutes for an apple tree telling it how to bear apples and not thorns, when the tree is able by its own nature to do this better than the man with all his books can describe and demand.

The evidence of our own eyes makes it more plausible to believe that the world was not created by any god at all. If, however, we insist on believing in divine creation, we are forced to admit that the god who made the world cannot be all-powerful and all good. He must be either evil or a bungler.

No man ought to glory except in that which is his own.

From the point of view of semantics, errors must be accidents: if in the extension of "horse" there are no cows, then it cannot be required for the meaning of "horse" that cows be called horses. On the other hand, if "horse" did not mean that which it means, and if it were an error for horses, it would never be possible for a cow to be called "horse." Putting the two things together, it can be seen that the possibility of falsely saying "this is a horse" presupposes the existence of a semantic basis for saying it truly, but not vice versa. If we put this in terms of the crude causal theory, the fact that cows cause one to say "horse" depends on the fact that horses cause one to say "horse"; but the fact that horses cause one to say "horse" does not depend on the fact that cows cause one to say "horse"...

The source of every Crime, is some defect of the Understanding; or some error in Reasoning, or some sudden force of the Passions. Defect in the Understanding, is Ignorance; in Reasoning, Erroneous Opinion.

He who does not wish to die cannot have wished to live.

Now any dogma, based primarily on faith and emotionalism, is a dangerous weapon to use on others, since it is almost impossible to guarantee that the weapon will never be turned on the user.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.

No wild beasts are such enemies to mankind as are most of the Christians in their deadly hatred of one another.

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

I am an enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but coin.

A golden bit does not make a better horse.

As far as physicians go, chance is more valuable than knowledge.

There is no nature which is inferior to art, the arts imitate the nature of things.

If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.

All the better; they do not force me to do anything that I would not have done of my own accord if I did not dread scandal. But since they want it that way, I enter gladly on the path that is opened to me, with the consolation that my departure will be more innocent than was the exodus of the early Hebrews from Egypt.

I have said that, in a sense, the parasites were a 'shadow' of man's cowardice and passivity. Their strength could increase in an atmosphere of defeat and panic, for it fed on human fear. In that case, the best way to combat them was to change the atmosphere to one of strength and purpose.

Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is the highest degree of attention.

You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that's all.

Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you.

As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses.

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing.

Before a man can do things there must be things he will not do.

I said to the almond tree: "Speak to me of God."and the almond tree blossomed.

At the very beginning of my fevers and sicknesses that cast me down, whilst still entire, and but little, disordered in health, I reconcile myself to Almighty God by the last Christian, offices, and find myself by so doing less oppressed and more easy, and have got, methinks, so much the better of my disease. And I have yet less need of a notary or counsellor than of a physician.

The enmity of one's kindred is far more bitter than the enmity of strangers.

I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician, this surprise surprised me.

The will to the "true world" in the sense of Plato and Christianity ... is in truth a no-saying to our present world, precisely the one in which art is at home.

It is impossible to feel equal respect for things that are in fact unequal unless the respect is given to something that is identical in all of them. Men are unequal in all their relations with the things of this world, without exception. The only thing that is identical in all men is the presence of a link with the reality outside the world. All human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter.

It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness.