A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

A million blockheads looking authoritatively into one man of what you call genius, or noble sense, will make nothing but nonsense out of him and his qualities, and his virtues and defects, if they look till the end of time. He understands them, sees what they are; but that they should understand him, and see with rounded outline what his limits are,-this, which would mean that they are bigger than he, is forever denied them. Their one good understanding of him is that they at last should loyally say, "We do not quite understand thee; we perceive thee to be nobler and wiser and bigger than we, and will loyally follow thee."

The true is the whole.

There is nothing enduring, permanent, either in me or out of me, nothing but everlasting change. I know of no existence, not even of my own. I know nothing and am nothing. Images - pictures - only are, pictures which wander by without anything existing past which they wander, without any corresponding reality which they might represent, without significance and without aim. I myself am one of these images, or rather a confused image of these images. All reality is transformed into a strange dream, without a world of which the dream might be, or a mind that might dream it. Contemplation is a dream; thought, the source of all existence and of all that I fancied reality, of my own existence, my own capacities, is a dream of that dream.

...they cudgel their brains with absurd questions, such as, for instance, why God did not make the world many centuries earlier. They persuade themselves that it is easy to conceive, to be sure, how God may discern what is present, that is, what is actual in the time in which he is, but how He may foresee what is future, that is, what is actual in the time in which He is not yet, they deem an intellectual difficulty; as if the existence of the Necessary Being descended through all the moments of an imaginary time, and, having already exhausted a part of His duration, saw before Him the eternity He was yet to live simultaneously with the present events of the world. All these difficulties upon proper insight into the notion of time vanish like smoke.

I came to set fire to the earth, and I wish it were already on fire!

When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.

Remember that all is opinion.

Some modern philosophers have gone so far as to say that words should never be confronted with facts but should live in a pure, autonomous world where they are compared only with other words. When you say, 'the cat is a carnivorous animal,' you do not mean that actual cats eat actual meat, but only that in zoology books the cat is classified among carnivora. These authors tell us that the attempt to confront language with fact is 'metaphysics' and is on this ground to be condemned. This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.

Violence and injury enclose in their net all that do such things, and generally return upon him who began.

Emptiness simply prevents what is individual from insisting on itself.

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do to-day.

Second, we make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man.

Knowledge is the food of the soul; and we must take care, my friend, that the Sophist does not deceive us when he praises what he sells, like the dealers wholesale or retail who sell the food of the body; for they praise indiscriminately all their goods, without knowing what are really beneficial or hurtful.

Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.

Thou hast made us for Thyself, and the heart never resteth till it findeth rest in Thee.

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

To throw oneself into strange teachings is quite dangerous.

It was Rousseau who was largely responsible for the problem by giving currency to the idea that freedom can exist without responsibility and discipline.

In the course of instruction which I have partially retraced, the point most superficially apparent is the great effort to give, during the years of childhood an amount of knowledge in what are considered the higher branches of education, which is seldom acquired (if acquired at all) until the age of manhood.

And when all the world is overcharged with Inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is Warre, which provideth for every man, by Victory or Death.

Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both.

It is beyond dispute that the state exercises very great power over human life and it always shows a tendency to go beyond the limits laid down for it.

We should like to represent... the... universe, and... feel... we understood it. We... never can attain this representation: our weakness is too great. But... we desire... to conceive an infinite intelligence... which should see all, and... classify all in its time, as we classify, in our time, the little we see. ...This supreme intelligence would be only a demigod; infinite in one sense... limited in another, since it would have... imperfect recollection of the past... otherwise all recollections would be equally present... and for it there would be no time.

The evident justice and utility of the foregoing maxims have recommended them more or less to the attention of all nations.

Many Catholic mystics have affirmed that, at a certain stage of that contemplative prayer in which, according to the most authoritative theologians, the life of Christian perfection ultimately consists, it is necessary to put aside all thought of the Incarnation as distracting from the higher knowledge of that which has been incarnated. From this fact have arisen misunderstandings in plenty and a number of intellectual difficulties.

Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality.

If I had followed the multitude, I should not have studied philosophy.

A certain maxim of Logic which I have called Pragmatism has recommended itself to me for diverse reasons and on sundry considerations. Having taken it as my guide for most of my thought, I find that as the years of my knowledge of it lengthen, my sense of the importance of it presses upon me more and more. If it is only true, it is certainly a wonderfully efficient instrument. It is not to philosophy only that it is applicable. I have found it of signal service in every branch of science that I have studied. My want of skill in practical affairs does not prevent me from perceiving the advantage of being well imbued with pragmatism in the conduct of life.

Taken as a whole, the Cross Correspondences and the Willet scripts are among the most convincing evidence that at present exists for life after death. For anyone who is prepared to devote weeks to studying them, they prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Myers, Gurney, and Sidgwick went on communicating after death.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

It is from the shadow of a cloister that there emerges one of mankind's greatest very greatest scourges. Luther appears; Calvin follows him. The Peasants' Revolt; the Thirty Years' War; the civil war in France; the massacre of the Low Countries; the massacre of Ireland; the massacre of the Cévennes; St Bartholomew's Day; the murders of Henry II, Henry IV, Mary Stuart, and Charles I; and finally, in our day, from the same source, the French Revolution.

What so impressed me on that first reading was the self-containedness of Tolkien's world. I suppose there are a few novelists who have created worlds that are uniquely their own -- Faulkner, for example, or Dickens. But since their world is fairly close to the actual world, it cannot really be called a unique creation. The only parallel that occurs to me is the Wagner Ring cycle, that one can only enter as if taking a holiday on a strange planet.

Every one who has a heart and eyes sees that you, working men, are obliged to pass your lives in want and in hard labor, which is useless to you, while other men, who do not work, enjoy the fruits of your labor-that you are the slaves of these men, and that this ought not to exist.

One can only become a philosopher, but not be one. As one believes he is a philosopher, he stops being one.

We may assume the existence of an aether; only we must give up ascribing a definite state of motion to it, i.e. we must by abstraction take from it the last mechanical characteristic which Lorentz had still left it. ... But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it.

A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.

He that is not with me is against me: and he that gathereth not with me scattereth.

When there were gathered together an innumerable multitude of people, insomuch that they trode one upon another, he began to say unto his disciples first of all, Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops. And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.

The Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations, down to their very names. The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.

Not to feel exasperated or defeated or despondent because your days aren't packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human-however imperfectly-and fully embrace the pursuit you've embarked on.

Charity, by which God and neighbor are loved, is the most perfect friendship.

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.

Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things.

There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.

Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat? Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from both. And for this third entity, again, there are two possible modes: it might be either a blend or a distinct form due to the blending.