Epochs do not rise from the dead.... [W]hereas you can make a replica of an ancient statue, there is no possible replica of an ancient state of mind. There can be no nearer approximation than that which a masquerade bears to real life. There may be understanding of the past, but there is a difference between the modern and the ancient reactions to the same stimuli.

I will follow the good side right to the fire, but not into it if I can help it.

I came to set fire to the earth, and I wish it were already on fire!

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

France wanted to make proselytes to her opinions, and turn every government in the world into a republic. If every government was against her, it was because she had declared herself hostile to every government. He knew of nothing to which this strange republic could be compared, but to the system of Mahomet, who with the koran in one hand, and a sword in the other, held out the former to the acceptance of mankind, and with the latter compelled them to adopt it as their creed. The koran which France held out, was the declaration of the rights of man and universal fraternity; and with the sword she was determined to propagate her doctrines, and conquer those whom she could not convince.

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

But let the individual man lay claim to ever so many rights because Man or the concept man 'entitles' him to them, because his being man does it: what do I care for his right and his claim? If he has his right only from Man and does not have it from me, then for me he has no right. His life, for example, counts to me only for what it is worth to me. I respect neither a so-called right of property (or his claim to tangible goods) nor yet his right to the 'sanctuary of his inner nature' (or his right to have the spiritual goods and divinities, his gods, remain un-aggrieved). His goods, the sensuous as well as the spiritual, are mine, and I dispose of them as proprietor, in the measure of my - might.

Self-expression is impossible in relation with other men; their self-expression interferes with it. The greatest heights of self-expression in poetry, music, painting - are achieved by men who are supremely alone.

Every noble crown is, and on earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.

The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted. The only self-renunciation which it applauds, is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means of happiness, of others; either of mankind collectively, or of individuals within the limits imposed by the collective interests of mankind.

All of this that is happening to me, and happening to others about me, is it reality or is it fiction? May not all of it perhaps be a dream of God, or of whomever it may be, which will vanish as soon as He wakes? And therefore when we pray to Him, and cause canticles and hymns to rise to Him, is it not that we may lull Him to sleep, rocking the cradle of His dreams? Is not the whole liturgy, of all religions, only a way perhaps of soothing God in His dreams, so that He shall not wake and cease to dream us?

No, you cannot expect people to understand the higher reaches of philosophy. Culture should be taken out of the hands of the dollar chasers. We need a national subsidy for literature. It is disgraceful that artists are treated like peddlers and that art works have to be sold like soap.

Science is the knowledge of Consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another: by which, out of that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will, or the like, another time.

Instead of insanity eliminating the crime according to the original meaning of article 64,every crime and even every offense now carries within it, as a legitimate suspicion, but also as a right that may be claimed, the hypothesis of insanity, in any case of anomaly. And the sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgement of guily, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization Today the judge- magistrate or juror0 certainly does more than 'judge'.

We suppose, it would seem, that concepts grow in the individual mind like leaves on a tree, and we think to discover their nature by studying their growth; we seek to define them psychologically, in terms of the human mind. But this account makes everything subjective, and if we follow it through to the end, does away with truth. What is known as the history of concepts is really a history either of our knowledge of concepts or of the meanings of words.

When I was a child, the institution of war, which, by then, had been in existence for perhaps about five thousand years, was still being taken for granted by most people in the World as a normal and acceptable fact of life. One small religious community, the Society of Friends, was at that time singular in condemning war as immoral and in consequently refusing to have any part or lot in war-making.

Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

No doubt a tumult caused by local and temporary irritation ought to be suppressed with promptitude and vigour. Such disturbances, for example, as those which Lord George Gordon raised in 1780, should be instantly put down with the strong hand. But woe to the Government which cannot distinguish between a nation and a mob! Woe to the Government which thinks that a great, a steady, a long continued movement of the public mind is to be stopped like a street riot! This error has been twice fatal to the great House of Bourbon. God be praised, our rulers have been wiser. The golden opportunity which, if once suffered to escape, might never have been retrieved, has been seized. Nothing, I firmly believe, can now prevent the passing of this noble law, this second Bill of Rights.

In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call "inert ideas"-that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilised, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is, that they are overladen with inert ideas. Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful.

"Let us work without reasoning," said Martin; "it is the only way to make life endurable."

In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

"Genius" (which means transcendent capacity of taking trouble, first of all).

Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight.

Remind yourself that all men assert that wisdom is the greatest good, but that there are few who strenuously seek out that greatest good.

We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

To cleave that sea in the gentle autumnal season, murmuring the name of each islet, is to my mind the joy most apt to transport the heart of man into paradise.

We are delighted to find a person who values us as we value ourselves, and distinguishes us from the rest of mankind, with an attention not unlike that with which we distinguish ourselves.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts, but not describe them.

Of all the books I have ever worked on, I think Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare gave me the most pleasure, day in, day out. For months and months I lived and thought Shakespeare, and I don't see how there can be any greater pleasure in the world, any pleasure, that is, that one can indulge in for as much as ten hours without pause, day after day indefinitely.

Water and navigation had that role to play. Locked in the ship from which he could not escape, the madman was handed over to the thousand-armed river, to the sea where all paths cross, and the great uncertainty that surrounds all things. A prisoner in the midst of the ultimate freedom, on the most open road of all, chained solidly to the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence, the prisoner of the passage. It is not known where he will land, and when he lands, he knows not whence he came. His truth and his home are the barren wasteland between two lands that can never be his own. One thing is certain: the link between water and madness is deeply rooted in the dream of the Western man.

If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works. Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.

Being asked where in Greece he saw good men, he replied, "Good men nowhere, but good boys at Sparta."

Perhaps there is nobody who would sacrifice his life for the sake of maintaining that the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles, for such a truth does not demand the sacrifice of our life; but, on the other hand, there are many who have lost their lives for the sake of maintaining their religious faith. Indeed, it is truer to say that martyrs make faith than that faith makes martyrs. For faith is not the mere adherence of the intellect to an abstract principle; it is not the recognition of a theoretical truth, the process in which the will merely sets in motion our faculty of comprehension; faith is an act of the will - it is a movement of the soul towards a practical truth, towards a person, towards something that makes us not merely comprehend life, but that makes us live.

O ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have brought no bread? Do ye not yet understand, neither remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? Neither the seven loaves of the four thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? How is it that ye do not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that ye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees?

The conscious side of woman corresponds to the emotional side of man, not to his "mind." Mind makes up the soul, or better, the "animus" of woman, and just as the anima of a man consists of inferior relatedness, full of affect, so the animus of woman consists of inferior judgments, or better, opinions.

We have chosen Mahomet not as the most eminent Prophet; but as the one we are freest to speak of. He is by no means the truest of Prophets; but I do esteem him a true one. Farther, as there is no danger of our becoming, any of us, Mahometans, I mean to say all the good of him I justly can. It is the way to get at his secret: let us try to understand what he meant with the world; what the world meant and means with him, will then be a more answerable question. Our current hypothesis about Mahomet, that he was a scheming Impostor, a Falsehood incarnate, that his religion is a mere mass of quackery and fatuity, begins really to be now untenable to any one. The lies, which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man, are disgraceful to ourselves only.

I think we must be careful about too easily accepting, or being too easily grateful for, sacrifices made by others, especially if we have made none ourselves.

But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual leveling-down - or, we might say, its death - appears to be proved. And how will this process affect the fate of our spirit? Will it wane with the degradation of the energy of our world and return to unconsciousness, or will it grow according as the utilizable energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to retard this degradation and to dominate Nature? - for this it is that constitutes the life of the spirit. May it be that consciousness and its extended support are two powers in contraposition, the one growing at the expense of the other?

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect, I am not a Jew.

For as old age is that period of life most remote from infancy, who does not see that old age in this universal man ought not to be sought in the times nearest his birth, but in those most remote from it?

Never any good came out of female domination. God created Adam master and lord of living creatures, but Eve spoiled it all.

The habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are - terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by nature, born devils.

Today's fashion magazines may carry an article about the dangers of anorexia while bombarding its readers with images of emaciated young bodies representing the height of beauty and desirability.

I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide . . .

Who would govern that can get along without governing? He that is fittest for it, is of all men the unwillingest unless constrained.