Hear, and understand: Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Now about your family. Do you know that since your daughter came out everyone has been enraptured by her? They say she is amazingly beautiful.

I am aware that the great Plato himself, and after him, a man posterior to him in date, though not in mind, I mean Iamblichus of Chalcis (who initiated us into other branches of philosophy, and also into this by means of his discourses), did both of them as far as hypothesis goes, take for granted the fact of a Creation and assumed the universe to have been, in a certain sense, the Work of Time, in order that the most important of the effects produced by this Power, may be reduced into a shape for examination.

How abundantly do spiritual beings display the powers that belong to them! We look for them, but do not see them; we listen to, but do not hear them; yet they enter into all things, and there is nothing without them.

The result of your fifty or sixty years of religious reading in the four words: 'Be just and good,' is that in which all our enquiries must end.

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.

I cannot live without books.

No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right.

The most taboo issue on U.S. campuses these days, in many instances, has to do with the vicious Israeli occupation of precious Palestinians. It's very difficult to have a respectful, robust conversation about that. And I am unequivocal in my solidarity with Palestinian brothers and sisters... I'm not in any way going to stop talking about the Palestinian plight and predicament.

The sham cause in physical influence consists in rashly assuming that the commerce of substance and transitive forces is sufficiently knowable from their mere existence. Hence it is not so much a system as rather the neglect of all philosophical system as a superfluity in the argument. Freeing the concept from this defect, we shall have a species of commerce alone deserving to be called real, and from which the whole constituting the world merits being called real, and not ideal or imaginary.

Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and wind out; in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet water; in two suits of clothes, so to change your dress when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn; in a good double-wick lamp; and three meals; in a horse, or a locomotive, to cross the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools to work with; in books to read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tolls and auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day, and knowledge, and good-will.Wealth begins with these articles of necessity.

Whatever you do, crush the infamous thing, and love those who love you.

We are alive within mystery, by miracle. "Life," wrote Erwin Chargaff, "is the continual intervention of the inexplicable." We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say. The constructions of language (which is to say the constructions of thought) are formed within experience, not the other way around. Finally we live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory. There is no reason whatever to assume that the languages of science are less limited than other languages.

Nowadays, to say that we are clever animals is not to say something philosophical and pessimistic but something political and hopeful - namely, if we can work together, we can make ourselves into whatever we are clever and courageous enough to imagine ourselves becoming. This is to set aside Kant's question "What is man?" and to substitute the question "What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?"

A slave's soul has no worth, my brothers; it lacks strengthto tread on this great earth with gallantry and freedom.I pity the poor slaves, they're nought but airy mist,a light breeze scatters them, a fragrance knocks them down;it's only just they crawl on the earth on hands and knees.Today I'll write a hymn to God and pray for this great grace.

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.

The mystery is that the world is at it is -- a mystery that is the source of all joy and all sorrow, of all hope and fear, and the source of development both creative and degenerative. The contingency of all into which time enters is the source of pathos, comedy, and tragedy.

We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans - convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution.

New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.

Of my grandfather Verus I have learned to be gentle and meek, and to refrain from all anger and passion... I have learned both shamefastness and manlike behaviour. Of my mother I have learned to be religious, and bountiful; and to forbear, not only to do, but to intend any evil; to content myself with a spare diet, and to fly all such excess as is incidental to great wealth.

Why don't I commit suicide? Because I am as sick of death as I am of life.

The more Lil' Kim distorted her natural beauty to become a cartoonlike caricature of whiteness, the larger her success.

Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.

Religion is to mysticism what popularization is to science. What the mystic finds waiting for him, then, is a humanity which has been prepared to listen to his message by other mystics invisible and present in the religion which is actually taught. Indeed his mysticism itself is imbued with this religion, for such was its starting point. His theology will generally conform to that of the theologians. His intelligence and his imagination will use the teachings of the theologians to express in words what he experiences, and in material images what he sees spiritually. And this he can do easily, since theology has tapped that very current whose source is the mystical. Thus his mysticism is served by religion, against the day when religion becomes enriched by his mysticism. This explains the primary mission which he feels to be entrusted to him, that of an intensifier of religious faith.

If the colleges were better, if they ... had the power of imparting valuable thought, creative principles, truths which become powers, thoughts which become talents, - if they could cause that a mind not profound should become profound, - we should all rush to their gates: instead of contriving inducements to draw students, you would need to set policy at the gates to keep order in the in-rushing multitude.

The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.

The essential nature (concerning the soul) cannot be corporeal, yet it is also clear that this soul is present in a particular bodily part, and this one of the parts having control over the rest (heart).

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

All of the days go toward death and the last one arrives there.

An organised system of machines, to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from a central automation, is the most developed form of production by machinery.

The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.

The old form of trade union, which was born in the nineteenth century and aimed primarily at negotiating wages for a specific trade is no longer sufficient. First of all, as we have been arguing, the old trade unions are not able to represent the unemployed, the poor, or even the mobile and flexible post-Fordist workers with short term contracts, all of whom participate actively in social production and increase social wealth. Second, the old unions are divided according to the various products and tasks defined in the heyday of industrial production - a miners' union, a pipefitters' union, a machinists' union and so forth. Today, insofar as the conditions and the relations of labor are becoming common, these traditional divisions (or even newly defined divisions) no longer make sense and serve only as an obstacle. Finally the old unions have become purely economic, not political, organization.

Someone within me is struggling to lift a great weight, to cast off the mind and flesh by overcoming habit, laziness, necessity. I do not know from where he comes or where he goes. I clutch at his onward march in my ephemeral breast, I listen to his panting struggle, I shudder when I touch him.

It must be emphasized that the warrior spirit is one thing and the military spirit quite another. Militarism was unknown in the Middle Ages. The soldier signifies the degeneration of the warrior, corrupted by the industrialist. The soldier is an armed industrialist, a bourgeois who has invented gunpowder. He was organized by the state to make war on the castles. With his coming, long-distance warfare appeared, the abstract war waged by cannon and machine gun.

In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

It seems to be my destiny to discourse on truth, insofar as I discover it, in such a way that all possible authority is simultaneously demolished. Since I am incompetent and extremely undependable in men's eyes, I speak the truth and thereby place them in the contradiction from which they can be extricated only by appropriating the truth themselves. A man's personality is matured only when he appropriates the truth, whether it is spoken by Balaam's ass or a sniggering wag or an apostle or an angel.

The state is primarily an organization for killing foreigners.

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

Organizations and institutions permit stable expectations to be formed by each member of the group as to the behavior of the other members under specified conditions.

Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.

We are passengers, comprehended and displaced by metaphor.

To me, in these circumstances, that of "Hero-worship" becomes a fact inexpressibly precious; the most solacing fact one sees in the world at present. There is an everlasting hope in it for the management of the world. Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies that men ever instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty of Heroes being sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence Heroes when sent: it shines like a polestar through smoke-clouds, dust-clouds, and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration.