Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things will destroy themselves.

I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country's God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.

Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.

Water is the first principle of everything.

To conceive a thought - just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.

We are at war with a system, which, by it's essence, is inimical to all other Governments, and which makes peace or war, as peace and war may best contribute to their subversion. It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war. It has, by it's essence, a faction of opinion, and of interest, and of enthusiasm, in every country. To us it is a Colossus which bestrides our channel. It has one foot on a foreign shore, the other upon the British soil. Thus advantaged, if it can at all exist, it must finally prevail.

Order thyself so, that thy Soul may always be in good estate; whatsoever become of thy body.

Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic - if it is pulled out I shall die.

Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

Wherever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure: a larger heart, and a greater self-restraint, would put a calm autumnal sadness in the place of the instinctive outcry of pain.

Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.

Every good thing is gentle and consistent, progressing in good order and not going beyond what is right.

He who has begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin!

Physicians have this advantage: the sun lights their success and the earth covers their failures.

The perfection of the effect demonstrates the perfection of the cause, for a greater power brings about a more perfect effect. But God is the most perfect agent. Therefore, things created by Him obtain perfection from Him. So, to detract from the perfection of creatures is to detract from the perfection of divine power.

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.

The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.

Philosophy is said to have taken the 'linguistic turn' in this century. One hundred years ago, a philosopher would think in terms of mind, spirit, experience, consciousness; now the by-word is language.

One who seeks will find, and for one who knocks it will be opened.

Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open.

I've never been an optimist but that's fine because pessimists have the possibility of being agreeably surprised, and that's a reason for being pessimistic, but I've always defended a certain kind of pessimism because what is known as optimism is really a collection of illusions and I think one must recognise what all religious people know, which is that human beings are imperfect and fallen and there's no way in which they can alone surmount the problems which they themselves create.

A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason.

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?

Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone.

I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.

But since he has decided to have the impossibility of living, every misfortune is an opportunity which lays this importance of living before his eyes and obliges him to decide, once again, to die.

There's a Bible on that shelf there. But I keep it next to Voltaire - poison and antidote.

He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.

Since I would rather make of him an able man than a learned man, I would also urge that care be taken to choose a guide with a well-made rather than a well-filled head.

The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market.

Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims.

It is impossible to feel equal respect for things that are in fact unequal unless the respect is given to something that is identical in all of them. Men are unequal in all their relations with the things of this world, without exception. The only thing that is identical in all men is the presence of a link with the reality outside the world. All human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter.

The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.

In the long run, there is nothing to stop intelligent agents from identifying the molecular signature of experience below hedonic zero and eliminating it altogether - even in insects. Nociception is vital; pain is optional. I tentatively predict that the world's last unpleasant experience in our forward light-cone will be a precisely datable event - perhaps some micro-pain in an obscure marine invertebrate a few centuries hence.

And that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes.

It is not easy for any of us to stop measuring the world against the standard of Europe, but the concept of the multitude requires it of us. It is a challenge. Embrace it.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

Heroic love is the property of those superior natures who are called insane not because they do not know, but because they over-know.

The future of mankind, for the socialist, is simple: pull down the existing order and allow the future to emerge.

The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.

Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.

Jacobinism is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property.

We must not be enticed by mathematically attractive assumptions into pretending that the contingencies of men's social positions and the asymmetries of their situations somehow even out in the end. Rather we must choose our conception of justice fully recognizing that this is not and cannot be the case.

Since sounds have no natural connection with our ideas ... the doubtfulness and uncertainty of their signification ... has its cause more in the ideas they stand for than in any incapacity there is in one sound more than another to signify any idea.

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

What the Universities have mainly done-what I have found the University did for me, was that it taught me to read in various languages and various sciences, so that I could go into the books that treated of these things, and try anything I wanted to make myself master of gradually, as I found it suit me. Whatever you may think of all that, the clearest and most imperative duty lies on every one of you to be assiduous in your reading; and learn to be good readers, which is, perhaps, a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading-to read all kinds of things that you have an interest in, and that you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in.

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

Earth governments in moments of stress are not famous for being reasonable.