Whatever may happen to thee, it was prepared for thee from all eternity; and the implication of causes was from eternity spinning the thread of thy being, and of that which is incident to it. Alternate Translation: Whatever may befall you, it was preordained for you from everlasting.

Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and "gives the whole show away." The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden.

Mucius might have accomplished something more successful in that camp, but never anything more brave.

The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.

Americans need rest, but do not know it. I believe this to be a large part of the explanation of the crime wave in the United States.

I do not think that the dancing and singing of even little children can be explained wholly on the basis of unlearned and unformed responses to then existing objective conditions. Clearly there must be something in the present to evoke happiness. But the act is expressive only a there is in it a unison of something stored from past experience, something therefore generalized, with present conditions. In the case of expressions of happy children the marriage of past values and present incidents takes place easily; there are few obstructions to be overcome, few wounds to heal, few conflicts to resolve. With maturer persons, the reverse is the case. Accordingly the achievement of complete unison is rare; but when it occurs it is so on a deeper level and with a fuller content of meaning. And then, even though after long incubation and after precedent pangs of labor, the final expression may issue with the spontaneity of the cadenced speech or rhythmic movement of happy childhood.

It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.

If every pure character in the Old Testament announces the Messiah, if every unworthy person is his torturer and every woman his Mother, does not the Book of Books lose all life with this obsessive theme? On the doctrine of prefiguration.

There is no fundamental biological reason why the human genome can't be rewritten to allow everyone to be "in" love with everyone else - if we should so choose. But simply loving each other will be miraculous enough; and will probably suffice. An empty religious piety can be transformed into a biological reality. 

Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

Man, servant and interpreter of Nature, does and understands only as much as he has observed of the order of Nature, either in reality or in mind; he neither knows nor can do more.

Some say that the body is the "tomb" of the soul, their notion being that the soul is buried in the present life; and again, because by its means the soul gives any signs which it gives, it is for this reason also properly called "sign". But I think it most likely that the Orphic poets gave this name, with the idea that the soul is undergoing punishment for something; they think it has the body as an enclosure to keep it safe, like a prison, and this is, as the name itself denotes, the "safe" for the soul, until the penalty is paid, and not even a letter needs to be changed.

Let's not beat around the bush; I love life, that's my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.

Oh, can I really believe the poet's tales, that when one first sees the object of one's love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual. ... it seems to me that I should have to possess the beauty of all girls in order to draw out a beauty equal to yours; that I should have to circumnavigate the world in order to find the place I lack and which the deepest mystery of my whole being points towards, and at the next moment you are so near to me, filling my spirit so powerfully that I am transfigured for myself, and feel that it's good to be here.

Where this will end? In the Abyss, one may prophecy; whither all Delusions are, at all moments, travelling; where this Delusion has now arrived. For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live for ever. The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, and Heaven's Chancery itself; and, slowly or fast, advance incessantly towards their hour.

Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.

In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.

I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

Contemporary intellectuals have given up the Enlightenment assumption that religion, myth, and tradition can be opposed to something ahistorical, something common to all human beings qua human.

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.

Five [of the above] rules are of absolute necessity, and cannot be dispensed with without essential defect and often without error.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

They despised everything but virtue, caring little for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtue and friendship with one another, whereas by too great regard and respect for them, they are lost and friendship with them.

If anyone can be considered the greatest writer who ever lived, it is Shakespeare.

When one asked him what boys should learn, "That," said he, "which they shall use when men."

This also is a beautiful circumstance, that they referred every thing to Pythagoras, and called it by his name, and that they did not ascribe to themselves the glory of their own inventions, except very rarely.

Fame and wealth without wisdom are unsafe possessions.

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself.

There is another significant involution of time and movement in space. It is constituted not only by directional tendencies-up and down for example-but by mutual approaches and retreatings. Near and far, close and distant, are qualities of pregnant, often tragic, import-that is, as they are experienced, not just stated by measurement of science. They signify loosening and tightening, expanding and contracting, separating and compacting, soaring and drooping, rising and falling; the dispersive, scattering, and the hovering and brooding, unsubstantial lightness and massive blow. Such actions and reaction are the very stuff out if which the objects and events we experience are made.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

Assume, provisionally at any rate, a utilitarian ethic. The abolitionist project follows naturally, in "our" parochial corner of Hilbert space at least. On its completion, if not before, we should aim to develop superintelligence to maximise the well-being of the fragment of the cosmos accessible to beneficent intervention. And when we are sure - absolutely sure - that we have done literally everything we can do to eradicate suffering elsewhere, perhaps we should forget about its very existence.

The cultural atmosphere of Russia in those years had an adolescent quality, common to all periods of revolution: the belief that life is just beginning, that the future is unlimited, and that mankind is no longer bound by the shackles of history.

As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.

The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization.

If you only notice human proceedings, you may observe that all who attain great power and riches, make use of either force or fraud; and what they have acquired either by deceit or violence, in order to conceal the disgraceful methods of attainment, they endeavor to sanctify with the false title of honest gains. Those who either from imprudence or want of sagacity avoid doing so, are always overwhelmed with servitude and poverty; for faithful servants are always servants, and honest men are always poor; nor do any ever escape from servitude but the bold and faithless, or from poverty, but the rapacious and fraudulent. God and nature have thrown all human fortunes into the midst of mankind; and they are thus attainable rather by rapine than by industry, by wicked actions rather than by good. Hence it is that men feed upon each other, and those who cannot defend themselves must be worried.

I should prefer that Fortune keep me in her camp rather than in the lap of luxury. If I am tortured, but bear it bravely, all is well; if I die, but die bravely, it is also well.

Attractions take place between bodies, affinities between the particles of a body. The former may be compared to the alliances of states, the latter to the ties of family.

Compared with the wholesale violence of capital and government, political acts of violence are but a drop in the ocean. That so few resist is the strongest proof how terrible must be the conflict between their souls and unbearable social iniquities.

There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.

A thing therefore never returns to nothing.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.

Not being able to ban sexuality altogether, Catholicism has tried to reduce it to a mere biological fact, allowing its use in marriage only for procreation. Unlike certain ancient traditions, Catholicism has recognized no higher value, not even a potential one, in the sexual experience taken in itself. There is lacking any basis for its transformation in the interests of a more intense life, to integrate and elevate the inner tension of two beings of different sexes, whereas it is in exactly these terms that one should conceive of a concrete "sacralization" of the union and the effect of a higher influence involved in the rite.

So far from the posterior lobe, the posterior cornu, and the hippocampus minor, being structures peculiar to and characteristic of man, as they have been over and over again asserted to be, even after the publication of the clearest demonstration of the reverse, it is precisely these structures which are the most marked cerebral characters common to man with the apes. They are among the most distinctly Simian peculiarities which the human organism exhibits.

The man that does not know himself not to be at the mercy of other men, that does not feel that he is invulnerable to all the vicissitudes of fortune, is incapable of a constant and inflexible virtue.