In the Hindoo scripture the idea of man is quite illimitable and sublime. There is nowhere a loftier conception of his destiny. He is at length lost in Brahma himself 'the divine male.' ... there is no grandeur conception of creation anywhere .... The very indistinctness of its theogeny implies a sublime truth.

Scientists try to eliminate their false theories, they try to let them die in their stead. The believer-whether animal or man-perishes with his false beliefs.

It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.

It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

Though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us; and in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence of the load.

At the very high speed of living, everybody needs a new career and a new job and a totally new personality every ten years.

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.

A dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest but poor.

When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool.

I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.

The concrete man has but one interest - to be right. That to him is the art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it.

Prejudice is an opinion without judgement.

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books!

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

The happy consciousness is shaky enough-a thin surface over fear, frustration, and disgust.

I must interpret the life about me as I interpret the life that is my own. My life is full of meaning to me. The life around me must be full of significance to itself. If I am to expect others to respect my life, then I must respect the other life I see, however strange it may be to mine. And not only other human life, but all kinds of life: life above mine, if there be such life; life below mine, as I know it to exist. Ethics in our Western world has hitherto been largely limited to the relations of man to man. But that is a limited ethics. We need a boundless ethics which will include the animals also.

Dialogue and monologue are silenced. Bundled together, men march without Thou and without I, those of the left who want to abolish memory, and those of the right who want to regulate it: hostile and separated hosts, they march into the common abyss.

Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly.

We are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.

Make thyself pure, 0 righteous man! Anyone in the world here below can win purity for himself, namely, when he cleanses himself with Good Thoughts, Good Words, and Good Deeds.

Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalist system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort, from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of Geneva and New England.

The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief... So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies.

It is told that those who first brought out the irrationals from concealment into the open perished in shipwreck, to a man. For the unutterable and the formless must needs be concealed. And those who uncovered and touched this image of life were instantaneously destroyed and shall remain forever exposed to the play of the eternal waves.

Eloquence may strike the ear, but the language of poverty strikes the heart; the first may charm like music, but the second alarms like a knell. 

We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side; one which we preach but do not practise, and another which we practise but seldom preach.

This type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evils of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind.

Whoever desires to live among men has to obey their laws-this is what the secular morality of Western civilization comes down to. ... Rationality in the form of such obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think.

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."

Rooted in freedom, bonded in the fellowship of danger, sharing everywhere a common human blood, we declare again that all men are brothers, and that mutual tolerance is the price of liberty.

You're either excluding the right people or including the wrong people.

In short, analytic statements are statements which we all accept and for which we do not give reasons. This is what we mean when we say that they are true by 'implicit convention'. The problem is then to distinguish them from other statements that we accept, and do not give reasons for, in particular from the statements that we unreasonably accept. To resolve this difficulty, we have to point out some of the crucial distinguishing features of analytic statements (e.g. the fact that the subject concept is not a law-cluster concept), and we have to connect these features with what, in the preceding section, was called the 'rationale' of the analytic-synthetic distinction. Having done this, we can see that the acceptance of analytic statements is rational, even though there are no reasons (in the sense of' evidence') in connection with them.

I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.

I use the word nursing for want of a better. It has been limited to signify little more than the administration of medicines and the application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet - all at the least expense of vital power to the patient.

I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible.

A prating barber asked Archelaus how he would be trimmed. He answered, "In silence."

Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden.

Conscience is deceived by the social. Our supplementary energy (imaginative) is to a great extent taken up with the social. It has to be detached from it. That is the most difficult of detachments.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy'.

The poverty of the incapable, the distresses that come upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and those shoulderings aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many "in shallows and in miseries," are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.

Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society.

When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.

Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

[When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.

Seek after the good, and with much toil shall ye find it; the evil turns up of itself without your seeking it.

For us in Russia, communism is a dead dog, while, for many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

People don't want to be understood - I mean not completely. It's too destructive. Then they haven't anything left.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Step not beyond the beam of the balance.