That persons have opposing interests and seek to advance their own conception of the good is not at all the same thing as their being moved by envy and jealousy.

It is difficulties that show what men are.

The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

No man of sense can put himself and his soul under the control of names... You must consider courageously and thoroughly and not accept anything carelessly.

The softer you find your child is, the more you are to seek occasions, at fit times, thus to harden him. The great art in this is, to begin with what is but very little painful, and to proceed by insensible degrees, when you are playing, and in good humour with him, and speaking well of him: and when you have once got him to think himself made amends for his suffering by the praise is given him for his courage; when he can take pride in giving such marks of his manliness, and can prefer the reputation of being brave and stout, to the avoiding a little pain, or the shrinking under it; you need nor despair in time and by the assistance of his growing reason, to master his timorousness, and mend the weakness of his constitution.

The yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation: he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and, united to the nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rare intervals even I am a yogi .

A young man before he leaves the shelter of his father's house, and the guard of a tutor, should be fortify'd with resolution, and made acquainted with men, to secure his virtues, lest he should be led into some ruinous course, or fatal precipice, before he is sufficiently acquainted with the dangers of conversation, and his steadiness enough not to yield to every temptation.

It is the nature of science that answers automatically pose new and more subtle questions.

Man reaches the highest point of his knowledge about God when he knows that he knows him not, inasmuch as he knows that that which is God transcends whatsoever he conceives of him.

Americans cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die,... They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight. ... Death steps in in the end and stops him before he has grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes him. At first sight there is something astonishing in this spectacle of so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance. But it is a spectacle as old as the world; all that is new is to see a whole people performing in it.

Meaning created links so numerous, so rich and involved that only esoteric knowledge could possibly have the necessary key. Objects became so weighed down with attributes, connections and associations that they lost their own original face. Meaning was no longer read in an immediate perception, and accordingly objects ceased to speak directly: between the knowledge that animated the figures of objects and the forms they were transformed into, a divide began to appear, opening the way for a symbolism more often associated with the world of dreams.

And seeing every man is presumed to do all things in order to his own benefit, no man is a fit Arbitrator in his own cause.

The idea does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea.

Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners, and your face. It will bring you friendships. It will impledge you to truth by the love and expectation of generous minds. By virtue of the laws of that Nature, which is one and perfect, it shall yield every sincere good that is in the soul, to the scholar beloved of earth and heaven.

The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution which idealism palms off as the totality of being.

All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.

What man is to be, he must become; and as he is to be a being for himself, must become through himself. Nature completed all her works; only from man did she withdraw her hands, and precisely thereby gave him over to himself. Cultivability, as such, is the character of mankind. The impossibility of subsuming to the human form any other conception than that of his own Ego, is it, which forces every man inwardly to consider every other man as his equal.

Straightforward preaching spoils the effectiveness of a story. If you can't resist the impulse to improve your fellow human beings, do it subtly.

Those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

The reservedness and distance that fathers keep, often deprive their sons of that refuge which would be of more advantage to them than an hundred rebukes or chidings.

Christianity taught only what the whole of Asia knew already long before and even better.

It is remarkable that among all the preachers there are so few moral teachers. The prophets are employed in excusing the ways of men.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.

The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.

As we passed under the last bridge over the canal, just before reaching the Merrimack, the people coming out of church paused to look at us from above, and apparently, so strong is custom, indulged in some heathenish comparisons; but we were the truest observers of this sunny day.

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest. The proposition is so very manifest that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it; nor could it ever have been called in question had not the interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers confounded the common sense of mankind. Their interest is, in this respect, directly opposite to that of the great body of the people.

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one.

The proximity between the counterfeit and the good coin does not make the good coin counterfeit nor the counterfeit good. In the same way the proximity between truth and falsehood does not make truth falsehood nor falsehood truth.

How close men, despite all their knowledge, usually live to madness? What is truth but to live for an idea? When all is said and done, everything is based on a postulate; but not until it no longer stands on the outside, not until one lives in it, does it cease to be a postulate.

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.

To-day unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound; Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!

An atom blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.

The cause and root of nearly all evils in the sciences is this - that while we falsely admire and extol the powers of the human mind we neglect to seek for its true helps.

To sum up all these steps, each of which is very lengthy and complex, we will have put the game of truth back in the network of constraints and dominations. Truth, I should say rather, the system of truth and falsity, will have revealed the face it turned away from us for so long and which is that of its violence.

To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.

By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others. Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries.

The Word takes to Himself one man, for He takes unity. He does not take schisms to Himself, nor does He take heresies. So it is one man who is taken, and his Head is Christ. This is that "blessed man who hath not walked in the council of the ungodly" (Ps. 1:1); this is he that is assumed. He is not outside of us. Let us be in Him, and we shall be assumed; let us be in Him, and we shall be chosen. Therefore this one man that is taken to become the temple of God, is at once many and one.

A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.

Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

A fool with a heart and no sense is just as unhappy as a fool with sense and no heart.

As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

German idealism rescued philosophy from the attack of British empiricism, and the struggle between the two became not merely a clash of different philosophical school, but a struggle for philosophy as such.

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...

Sobriety is the strength of the soul, for it preserves its reason unclouded by passion.

The wreck of the Titanic functions as a sublime object: a positive, material object elevated to the status of the impossible Thing. And perhaps all the effort to articulate the metaphysical meaning of the Titanic is nothing but an attempt to escape this terrifying impact of the Thing, an attempt to domesticate the Thing by reducing it to its symbolic status, by providing it with a meaning. We usually say that the fascinating presence of a Thing obscures its meaning; here, the opposite is true: the meaning obscures the terrifying impact of its presence.

In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded, that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition.

The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.

The closed language does not demonstrate and explain-it communicates decision, dictum, command. Where it defines, the definition becomes "separation of good from evil;" it establishes unquestionable.