But if we discard this definition of a people, and, assuming another, say that a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love, then, in order to discover the character of any people, we have only to observe what they love. Yet whatever it loves, if only it is an assemblage of reasonable beings and not of beasts, and is bound together by an agreement as to the objects of love, it is reasonably called a people; and it will be a superior people in proportion as it is bound together by higher interests, inferior in proportion as it is bound together by lower.

Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes everything identical with man. And the work of man is to supernaturalize Nature - that is to say, to make it divine by making it human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short. The action of reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize.

I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self- government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away, against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world. To yourself, as the faithful advocate of the Union, I tender the offering of my high esteem and respect.

The best books are those, which those who read them believe they themselves could have written.

The most beautiful fate of a physical theory is to point the way to the establishment of a more inclusive theory, in which it lives on as a limiting case.

France had endeavoured under the specious pretext of an enlarged benevolence, to sow the seeds of enmity among nations, and destroy all local attachments, calling them narrow and illiberal-thereby to dissever the people from their governors.

One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.

It is, they say, not Russia that plans aggression but, on the contrary, the decaying capitalist democracies. Russia wants merely to defend its own independence. This is an old and well-tried method of justifying aggression. Louis XIV and Napoleon I, Wilhelm II and Hitler were the most peace-loving of all men. When they invaded foreign countries, they did so only in just self-defence. Russia was as much menaced by Estonia or Latvia as Germany was by Luxemburg or Denmark.

Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

The mechanical mind has a passion for control - of everything except itself. Beyond the control it has won over the forces of nature it would now win control over the forces of society of stating the problem and producing the solution, with social machinery to correspond.

And, oddly enough, even at times when the current style permitted a treatment of the less epileptic aspects of religion, no fully adequate rendering of the contemplative life was ever achieved in the plasdc arts of Christendom. The peace that passes all understanding was often sung and spoken; it was hardly ever painted or carved. Thus, in the writings of St. Bernard, of Albertus Magnus, of Eckhart and Tauler and Ruysbroeck one may find passages that express very clearly the nature and significance of mystical contemplation. But the saints who figure in medieval painting and sculpture tell us next to nothing about this anticipation of the beatific vision. There are no equivalents of those Far Eastern Buddhas and Bodhisattvas who incarnate, in stone and paint, the experience of ultimate reality.

We must plow through the whole of language.

Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one consciously, by means of certain external symbols, conveys to others the feelings one has experienced, whereby people so infected by these feelings, also experience them.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages.

Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just.

I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.

O saving Victim, opening wideThe gate of heaven to man below,Our foes press on from every side,Thine aid supply, Thy strength bestow.

The actor's realm is that of the fleeting.

If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, your church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind or generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.

Necessity gives the law without itself acknowledging one.

I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.

That passivity was the essence of the problem. The human being was intended to be passive only in a condition of fatigue, and not always then. Too much passivity of body produced surplus fat, short-windedness, indigestion: passivity of mind produced the same symptoms on the mental level. a feeling of spiritual dyspepsia. Since the average human being has no purposes that are not connected with the activities of keeping alive, the black room was bound to produce passivity, increasing dullness, a state in which the mind is at once awake and static, motionless, stagnant. This sense of dullness was nothing less than the collapse of the sense of reality and of values, the retreat into one's inner world.

The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.

Better red than dead.

In ourselves alone the absolute light keeps shining, a sigillum falsi et sui, mortis et vitae aeternae [false signal and signal of eternal life and death itself], and the fantastic move to it begins: to the external interpretation of the daydream, the cosmic manipulation of a concept that is utopian in principle. Finding this concept, finding the right for whose sake it behoves us to live, to be organized, to have time-this is where we are headed, why we are clearing the metaphysically constitutive trails afresh, calling for what is not, building into the blue that lines all edges of the world; this is why we build ourselves into the blue and search for truth and reality where mere factuality vanishes.

A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history according to a natural plan directed to achieving the civic union of the human race must be regarded as possible and, indeed, as contributing to this end of Nature.

However, what is really required to defend 'the West' against the sudden rise of these barbaric and elemental forces is the strengthening, to an extent perhaps still unknown to Western man, of a heroic vision of life. Apart from the military-technical apparatus the world of the 'Westerners' has at its disposal only a limp and shapeless substance - and the cult of the skin, the myth of 'safety' and of 'war on war', and the ideal of the long, comfortable guaranteed, 'democratic' existence, which is preferred to the ideal of the fulfilment which can be grasped only on the frontiers between life and death in the meeting of the essence of living with the extreme of danger.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view.

All relationships of people to each other rest, as a matter of course, upon the precondition that they know something about each other. The merchant knows that his correspondent wants to buy at the lowest price and to sell at the highest price. The teacher knows that he may credit to the pupil a certain quality and quantity of information. Within each social stratum the individual knows approximately what measure of culture he has to presuppose in each other individual.

There must then be something that is better, and that must be God. When you see a stately and stupendous edifice, though you do not know who is the owner of it, you would yet conclude it was not built for rats. And this divine structure, that we behold of the celestial palace, have we not reason to believe that it is the residence of some possessor, who is much greater than we?

The virtues are not poured into us, they are natural. Seek, and you will find them: neglect, and you will lose them.

Of the splendid constellation of great names... we admire the living and revere dead far too warmly and too deeply to suffer us sit in judgment on their respective claims to in this or that particular discovery; to balance mathematical skill of one against the experimental dexterity of another, or the philosophical acumen a third. So long as "one star differs from another in glory," - so long as there shall exist varieties, or even incompatibilities of excellence, - so long will the admiration of mankind be found sufficient for all who merit it.

I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.

We never have a full demonstration, although there is always an underlying reason for the truth, even if it is only perfectly understood by God, who alone penetrated the infinite series in one stroke of the mind.

When common words are appropriated as technical terms, their meaning and relations in common use should be retained as far as can conveniently be done.

To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.

There has never been any custom, however useless it may become with changing conditions, that isn't clung to desperately simply because it is something old and familiar.

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

Mathematical Analysis is... the true rational basis of the whole system of our positive knowledge.

I saw men go up and down, In the country and the town, With this tablet on their neck,- 'Judgement and a judge we seek.' Not to monarchs they repair, Nor to learned jurist's chair; But they hurry to their peers, To their kinsfolk and their dears; Louder than with speech they pray,- 'What am I? companion, say.'

A little flesh, a little breath, and a Reason to rule all - that is myself.

The Bank of the United States... is one of the most deadly hostility existing, against the principles and form of our Constitution... An institution like this, penetrating by its branches every part of the Union, acting by command and in phalanx, may, in a critical moment, upset the government. I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries. What an obstruction could not this bank of the United States, with all its branch banks, be in time of war! It might dictate to us the peace we should accept, or withdraw its aids. Ought we then to give further growth to an institution so powerful, so hostile?

In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual.... Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man's biological nature.

The fact is he made a prodigious blunder in commencing the attack, and now his only chance is to be silent and let people forget the exposure. I do not believe that in the whole history of science there is a case of any man of reputation getting himself into such a contemptible position.