Any question of philosophy ... which is so obscure and uncertain, that human reason can reach no fixed determination with regard to it; if it should be treated at all; seems to lead us naturally into the style of dialogue and conversation.

The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege.

Do the essences of proposition and of the truth determine themselves from out of the essence of the thing, or does the essence of the thing determine itself from out of the essence of the proposition? The question is posed as an either/or. However does this either/or itself suffice? Are the essence of the thing and the essence of the proposition only built as mirror images because both of them together determine themselves from out of the same but deeper lying root? However, what and where can be this common ground for the essence of the thing and of the proposition and of their origin? The unconditioned (Unbedingt)? We stated at the beginning that what conditions the essense of the thing in its thingness can no longer itself be thing and conditioned, it must be an unconditioned (Un-bedingtes).

With Gutenberg Europe enters the technological phase of progress, when change itself becomes the archetypal norm of social life.

Reason not with him, that will deny the principal truths!

There are two forms of knowledge, one genuine, one obscure. To the obscure belong all of the following: sight, hearing, smell, taste, feeling. The other form is the genuine, and is quite distinct from this. [And then distinguishing the genuine from the obscure, he continues:] Whenever the obscure [way of knowing] has reached the minimum sensibile of hearing, smell, taste, and touch, and when the investigation must be carried farther into that which is still finer, then arises the genuine way of knowing, which has a finer organ of thought.

Many evils, no doubt, were produced by the civil war. They were the price of our liberty.

The irony of world history turns everything upside down. We, the "revolutionaries," the "rebels"-we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and revolt. The parties of order, as they call themselves, are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves. They cry despairingly with Odilon Barrot: la légalité notes tue, legality is the death of us; whereas we, under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like eternal life.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

Brutes are merely brutal; men and women are capable of being devils and lunatics. They are no less capable of being fully human-even, occasionally, of being a bit more than fully human, of being saints, heroes and geniuses.

There is no doubt in my mind that, from the third-person point of view, monarchy is the most reasonable form of government. By embodying the state in a fragile human person, it captures the arbitrariness and the givenness of political allegiance, and so transforms allegiance into affection.

The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only.

Nothing is too terrible to be true if it is consistent with the laws of nature.

Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.

Epicurus, the great teacher of happiness, has correctly and finely divided human needs into three classes. First there are the natural and necessary needs which, if they are not satisfied, cause pain. Consequently, they are only victus et amictus [food and clothing] and are easy to satisfy. Then we have those that are natural yet not necessary, that is, the needs for sexual satisfaction. ... These needs are more difficult to satisfy. Finally, there are those that are neither natural nor necessary, the needs for luxury, extravagance, pomp, and splendour, which are without end and very difficult to satisfy.

God is the solitude of men. There was only me: I alone decided to commit Evil; alone, I invented Good. I am the one who cheated, I am the one who performed miracles, I am the one accusing myself today, I alone can absolve myself; me, the man.

The deceiver is really the fool.

History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility.

Our bodies are perishable, wealth is not at all permanent and death is always nearby. Therefore we must immediately engage in acts of merit.

Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

The vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate.

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and, if need be, die for it.

We share this planet, our home, with millions of species. Justice and sustainability both demand that we do not use more resources than we need. Restraint in resource use and living within nature's limits are preconditions for social justice. The commons are where justice and sustainability converge, where ecology and equity meet. The survival of pastures and forests as community property, or of a common good like a stable ecosystem, is only possible with social organizations with checks and controls on the use of resources built into their principles. The breakdown of a community, with the associated erosion of concepts of joint ownership and responsibility, can trigger the degradation of common resources.

There are defects and gaps in a liberal society that are constantly being filled by other longings and... structures... that sometimes end up undermining that liberal project.

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

The open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence.

The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and ... each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.

Writing is hard work. The fact that I love doing it doesn't make it less hard work. People who love tennis will sweat themselves to exhaustion playing it, and the love of the game doesn't stop the sweating. The casual assumption that writers are unemployed bums because they don't go to the office and don't have a boss is something every writer has to live with. I have never known a writer who hasn't suffered as a result of this, hasn't resented it, and hasn't dreamed of murdering the next person who says "Boy, you've sure got it made. You just sit there and toss off a story or something whenever you feel like it."

Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today.

The question of "unreality," which confronts us at this point, is a very important one. Misled by grammar, the great majority of those logicians who have dealt with this question have dealt with it on mistaken lines. They have regarded grammatical form as a surer guide in analysis than, in fact, it is. And they have not known what differences in grammatical form are important.

If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.

Chance seldom interferes with the wise man; his greatest and highest interests have been, are, and will be, directed by reason throughout his whole life.

Passing from quantity to quality of population, we come to the question of eugenics. We may perhaps assume that, if people grow less superstitious, government will acquire the right to sterilize those who are not considered desirable as parents. This power will be used, at first, to diminish imbecility, a most desirable object. But probably, in time, opposition to the government will be taken to prove imbecility, so that rebels of all kinds will be sterilized. Epileptics, consumptives, dipsomaniacs and so on will gradually be included; in the end, there will be a tendency to include all who fail to pass the usual school examinations. The result will be to increase the average intelligence; in the long run, it may be greatly increased. But probably the effect upon really exceptional intelligence will be bad. Mr. Micawber, who was Dickens's father, would hardly have been regarded as a desirable parent. How many imbeciles ought to outweigh one Dickens I do not profess to know.

The Clergy is the greatest hindrance to faith.

The dissimulation of the woven texture can in any case take centuries to undo its web: a web that envelops a web, undoing the web for centuries; reconstituting it too as an organism, indefinitely regenerating its own tissue behind the cutting trace, the decision of each reading. There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text without touching it, without laying a hand on the "object," without risking- which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught- the addition of some new thread.

The statue of Freedom has not been cast yet, the furnace is hot, we can all still burn our fingers.

It is the same thing: killing, dying, it is the same thing: one is just as alone in each. He is lucky, he will only die once. As for me, for ten days I have been killing him at every minute. Hugo to Jessica, on his plans to kill.

The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature - a type nowhere at present existing.

If you say that this is absurd, that we cannot be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such person know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd.

You have not that power you ought to have over him, till he comes to be more afraid of offending so good a friend than of losing some part of his future expectation.

It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.

One simple method is to take a pen or pencil and hold it up against a blank wall or ceiling. Now concentrate on the pen as if it is the most important thing in the world. Then allow your sense to relax, so you see the pen against the background of the wall. Concentrate again. Relax again. Keep on doing this until you become aware of the ability to focus attention at will. You will find that this unaccustomed activity of the will is tiring; it produces a sense of strain behind the eyes. My own perception is that if you persist, in spite of the strain, the result is acute discomfort, followed by a sudden immense relief - the 'peak experience'.

For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.

It is the destiny of our race to become united into one great body, thoroughly connected in all its parts, and possessed of similar culture. Nature, and even the passions and vices of Man, have from the beginning tended towards this end. A great part of the way towards it is already passed, and we may surely calculate that it will in time be reached.

As to the Approbation or Esteem of those Blockheads who call themselves the Public, & whom a Bookseller, a Lord, a Priest, or a Party can guide, I do most heartily despise it.

For the world to become philosophic amounts to philosophy's becoming world-order reality; and it means that philosophy, at the same time that it is realized, disappears.

The Pythagoreans made kindness to beasts a training in humanity and pity.

Every habit and faculty is confirmed and strengthened by the corresponding actions, that of walking by walking, that of running by running.