No differeance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now.

In our university of Virginia you know there is no Professorship of Divinity. A handle has been made of this, to disseminate an idea that this is an institution, not merely of no religion, but against all religion. Occasion was taken at the last meeting of the Visitors, to bring forward an idea that might silence this calumny, which weighed on the minds of some honest friends to the institution.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.

If you want to understand the beliefs that are shaping global politics, read the Book of Revelation.

The hypostasis of the particular methods of procedure employed by natural science ... results in the view that all theoretical differences which rest on historically conditioned antagonisms of interest are to be settles by a "crucial experiment" rather than by struggle and counter-struggle. The harmonious relation of individuals to one another becomes a fact, therefore, that has even more general character than a law of nature.

Faith and patriotism are the two great thaumaturges of this world. Both are divine; all their actions are prodigies. Do not go to them talking of examination, choice, or discussion; they will say that you blaspheme. They know only two words: submission and belief; with these two levers they raise the world. Even their errors are sublime. These two children of Heaven prove their origin to all eyes by creating and conserving; but if they unite, join their forces, and together take possession of a nation, they exalt it, they divinize it, and they increase its forces a hundred-fold.

There are cultures that can only picture their origins and not their ends. Some are obsessed by both. Two other positions are possible: only picturing one's end - our own culture; picturing neither beginning nor end - the coming culture.

And then one babbles - 'if only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.' But one can't tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But is it ever allowed? It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be done. He replies to our babble, 'you cannot and dare not. I could and dared.'

Nature does not do anything in vain.

Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.

Necessity, as well as patriotism and confidence, will make us all eager to receive treasury notes, if founded on specific taxes. Congress may borrow of the public, and without interest, all the money they may want, to the amount of a competent circulation, by merely issuing their own promissory notes, of proper denominations for the larger purposes of circulation, but not for the small. Leave that door open for the entrance of metallic money.

What is the purpose of houses? It is to protect us from the wind and cold of winter, the heat and rain of summer, and to keep out robbers and thieves. Once these ends have been secured, that is all. Whatever does not contribute to these ends should be eliminated.

The limits of this strategy were evident as the century drew to a close.

There is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude for awe and astonishment at existence. That is also a basis for respect for existence. We don't have much of it in this culture, even though we call it materialistic. In this culture we call materialistic, today we are of course bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gases. This is of course not a materialistic culture because it has no respect for material. And respect is in turn based on wonder.

Everyone explains that discussions about Socialism are exceedingly obscure; this obscurity is due, to a large extent, to the fact that contemporary socialists use a terminology which no longer corresponds to their ideas.

Try not to have Emily exposed to hours and hours of TV. It is a vile drug which permeates the nervous system, especially in the young.

The significance of God, cause, number, substance or soul consists, as James asserts, in nothing but the tendency of the given concept to make us act or think. If the world should reach a point at which it ceases to care not only about such metaphysical entities but also about murders perpetrated behind closed frontiers or simply in the dark, one would have to conclude that the concepts of such murders have no meaning, that they represent no 'distinct ideas' or truths, since they do not make any 'sensible difference to anybody.

In order to be transmuted into knowledge, every perception is and must be ordered and organized into categories. The extent, however, to which we can organize and express our experience in such conceptual forms is, in turn, dependent upon the frames of reference which happen to be available at a given historical moment. The concepts which we have and the universe of discourse in which we move, together with the directions in which they tend to elaborate themselves, are dependent largely upon the historical-social situation of the intellectually active and responsible members of the group.

There's something about a pious man such as he. He will cheerfully cut your throat if it suits him, but he will hesitate to endanger the welfare of your immaterial and problematical soul.

The superfluities of the rich are the necessaries of the poor. They who possess superfluities, possess the goods of others.

Be a craftsman in speech that thou mayest be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting.

Because machines could be made progressively more and more efficient, Western man came to believe that men and societies would automatically register a corresponding moral and spiritual improvement. Attention and allegiance came to be paid, not to Eternity, but to the Utopian future. External circumstances came to be regarded as more important than states of mind about external circumstances, and the end of human life was held to be action, with contemplation as a means to that end. These false and historically, aberrant and heretical doctrines are now systematically taught in our schools and repeated, day in, day out, by those anonymous writers of advertising copy who, more than any other teachers, provide European and American adults with their current philosophy of life. And so effective has been the propaganda that even professing Christians accept the heresy unquestioningly and are quite unconscious of its complete incompatibility with their own or anybody else's religion.

The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

A good symbol is the best argument and is a missionary to persuade thousands.

Suffering exists only because it was good for our genes. Conditionally-activated negative emotions were fitness-enhancing in the ancestral environment. In the current era, apologists for mental pain are serving as the innocent mouthpieces of the nasty bits of code which spawned them.

The end of living, or the ultimate good, which is to be sought for its own sake, according to the universal opinion of mankind, is happiness; yet men, for the most part, fail in the pursuit of this end, either because they do not form a right idea of the nature of happiness, or because they do not make use of proper means to attain it.

To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference.

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.

For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not justification, in the Protestant sense. Rather is this latter ethical. It is from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions - namely, that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in Catholicism.

Behind the stream of my mind and body, behind the stream of my race and all mankind, behind the stream of plants and animals, I watch with trembling the Invisible, treading on all visible things and ascending. Behind his heavy and blood-splattered feet I hear all living things being trampled on and crushed. His face is without laughter, dark and silent, beyond joy and sorrow, beyond hope.

We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.

I ask myself; Why is it that only some people suffer? Why are only some selected from the ranks of normal people and put on the torture rack? Some religions maintain that God is trying us through suffering, or that we expiate evil and unbelief through it. If such an explanation can satisfy the religious man, it is not sufficient for anyone who notices that suffering is arbitrary and unjust, because the innocent often suffer most. There is no valid justification for suffering. Suffering has no hierarchy of values.

Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.

Rather, we heirs of Enlightenment think of enemies of liberal democracy like Nietzsche or Loyola as, to use Rawls's word, "mad." We do so because there is no way to see them as fellow citizens of our constitutional democracy, people whose life plans might, given ingenuity and good will, be fitted in with those of other citizens. They are crazy because the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously. This, in turn, is determined by our upbringing, our historical situation.

I am a pattern watcher.

No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity; - for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.

It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours: The desert of the real itself.

We always love . . . despite; and that "despite" covers an infinity.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

Important though the general concepts and propositions may be with which the modern industrious passion for axiomatizing and generalizing has presented us, in algebra perhaps more than anywhere else, nevertheless I am convinced that the special problems in all their complexity constitute the stock and core of mathematics; and to master their difficulties requires on the whole the harder labor.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

In America, conscription is unknown; men are enlisted for payment. Compulsory recruitment is so alien to the ideas and so foreign to the customs of the people of the United States that I doubt whether they would ever dare to introduce it into their law.

Love and the gracious heart are a single thing...one can no more be without the otherthan the reasoning mind without its reason.