The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety.

There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

For a man petticoat government is the limit of insolence.

But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are 'reliefs,' occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice - inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. ... In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there - that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

Getting rid of predation isn't a matter of moralising. A python who kills a small human child isn't morally blameworthy. Nor is a lion who hunts and kills a terrified zebra. In both cases, the victim suffers horribly. But the predator lacks the empathetic and mind-reading skills needed to understand the implications of what s/he is doing. Some humans still display a similar deficit. From the perspective of the victim, the moral status or (lack of) guilty intent of a human or nonhuman predator is irrelevant. Either way, to stand by and watch the snake asphyxiate a child would be almost as morally abhorrent as to kill the child yourself. So why turn this principle on its head with beings of comparable sentience to human infants and toddlers? With power comes complicity.

For he who is unmusical is a child in music; he who is without letters is a child in learning; he who is untaught, is a child in life.

Virtue (or the man of virtue) is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.

Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.

Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines that who can only learn of the basis of trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. ...The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology.

It is important to remember that the viciousness and wrongs of life stick out very plainly but that even at the worst times there is a great deal of goodness, kindness, and day-to-day decency that goes unnoticed and makes no headlines.

The seat of faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual's faith into immediate relation with God. Here we must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd?

Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan.

To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.

Whatever can happen at any time can happen today.

Our life is no dream, but it should and perhaps will become one.

The pivot round which the religious life... revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism. The gods believed in-whether by crude savages or by men disciplined intellectually-agree with each other in recognizing personal calls. Religious thought is carried on in terms of personality, this being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental fact. To-day, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns.

The order and connection of the thought is identical to with the order and connection of the things.

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form-an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

A great prison structure was planned, whose different levels would correspond exactly to the levels of the centralized administration. The scaffold, where the body of the tortured criminal had been exposed to the ritually manifested force of the sovereign, the punitive theatre in which the representation of punishment was permanently available to the social body, was replaced by a great enclosed, complex and hierarchized structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus.

Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind.

I realized that the difference that I saw between things was the same thing as their unity, because differences (borders, lines, surfaces, boundaries) don't really divide things from each other at all, they join them together, because all boundaries are held in common.

In books of psychology written from the spiritualist point of view, it is customary to begin the discussion of the existence of the soul as a simple substance, separable from the body, after this style: There is in me a principle which thinks, wills and feels... Now this implies a begging of the question. For it is far from being an immediate truth that there is in me such a principle; the immediate truth is that I think, will and feel. And I - the I that thinks, wills and feels - am immediately my living body with the states of consciousness which it sustains. It is my living body that thinks, wills and feels.

Poetry teaches the enormous force of a few words, and, in proportion to the inspiration, checks loquacity.

Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.

Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came the human beings, they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.

Having acknowledged the measure of the good to be pleasure, i.e., beauty, the European upper classes went back in their comprehension of art to the gross conception of the primitive Greeks which Plato had already condemned. And with this understanding of life, a theory of art was formulated.

Junz found revulsion growing strong within him. A planet full of people meant nothing against the dictates of economic necessity!

The case of the conscience of Eichmann, which is admittedly complicated but is by no means unique, is scarcely comparable to the case of the German generals, one of whom, when asked at Nuremberg, "How was it possible that all of you honorable generals could continue to serve a murderer with such unquestioning loyalty?," replied that it was "not the task of a soldier to act as judge over his supreme commander. Let history do that or God in Heaven."

To be angry with a man is to hate him; to hate him is to wish him harm; but to wish him well, even if he has done you harm, is the mark of a great mind.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.

We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, which is the cause that what we believe we do not believe, and cannot disengage ourselves from what we condemn.

I think television has betrayed the meaning of democratic speech, adding visual chaos to the confusion of voices. What role does silence have in all this noise?

The lord of that servant will come in a day when he looketh not for him, and at an hour when he is not aware, and will cut him in sunder, and will appoint him his portion with the unbelievers.

Respectable scientists like de Broglie himself accept wave mechanics because it confers coherence and unity upon the experimental findings of contemporary science, and in spite of the astonishing changes it implies in connection with ideas of causality, time, and space, but it is because of these changes that it wins favor with the public. The great popular success of Einstein was the same thing. The public drinks in and swallows eagerly everything that tends to dispossess the intelligence in favor of some technique; it can hardly wait to abdicate from intelligence and reason and from everything that makes man responsible for his destiny.

When I collect my experiences, I notice that fascist is a person who holds one of the following beliefs (by way of example): 1) That people should wash themselves, rather than go dirty; 2) that freedom of the press in America is preferable to the ownership of the whole press by one ruling party; 3) that people should not be jailed for their opinions. both communist and anti-communist - 4), that racial criteria, in favour of either whites or blacks, are inadvisable in admission to Universities; 5 ) that torture is condemnable, no matter who applies it. (Roughly speaking "fascist" was the same as "liberal".) Fascist was, by definition, a person who happened to have been in jail in a communist country. The refugees from Czechoslovakia in 1968 were sometimes met in Germany by very progressive and absolutely revolutionary leftists with placards saying "fascism will not pass".

Pragmatism, in trying to turn experimental physics into a prototype of all science and to model all spheres of intellectual life after the techniques of the laboratory, is the counterpart of modern industrialism, for which the factory is the prototype of human existence, and which models all branches of culture after production on the conveyor belt.

There is absolute truth in anarchism and it is to be seen in its attitude to the sovereignty of the state and to every form of state absolutism. ... The religious truth of anarchism consists in this, that power over man is bound up with sin and evil, that a state of perfection is a state where there is no power of man over man, that is to say, anarchy. The Kingdom of God is freedom and the absence of such power... the Kingdom of God is anarchy.

Radical black feminists have never confined their vision to just the emancipation of black women or women in general, or all black people for that matter. Rather, they are the theorists and proponents of a radical humanism committed to liberating humanity and reconstructing social relations across the board. When bell hooks says "Feminism is for everybody," she is echoing what has always been a basic assumption of black feminists. We are not talking about identity politics but a constantly developing often contested, revolutionary conversation about how all of us might envision and remake the world.

As for me, when you want a good laugh, you will find me in fine state... fat and sleek, a true hog of Epicurus' herd.

In the deep discovery of the Subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfy some enquirers.

Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime. 

All-powerful god, who am I but the fear that I inspire in others?

The meaning of experience is typically one generation behind the experience. The content of new situations, both private and corporate, is typically the preceding situation.

It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

Personally, people know themselves very poorly.