A character is a completely fashioned will.

The mores I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution , of my freedom as a constituted, wilful, imperialistic subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible' the more just I am, the more guilty I am. I am 'in myself' through others.

Fate and temperament are two words for one and the same concept.

Love hath so long possessed me for his ownAnd made his lordship so familiar.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

An empire derives no advantage from the caresses of two turtledoves who spend a year cooing to each other in public meetings.

Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy.

Germany is now a field of cadavers, soon she will be a paradise.

The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.

I do not think it possible to get anywhere if we start from scepticism. We must start from a broad acceptance of whatever seems to be knowledge and is not rejected for some specific reason.

If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much - and then performed so little.

Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy.

That Vulcan gave arrows unto Apollo and Diana the fourth day after their Nativities, according to Gentile Theology, may pass for no blind apprehension of the Creation of the Sun and Moon, in the work of the fourth day.

When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.

IV. Every tax ought to be contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the state.

Lives matter in the sense that they assume physical form within the sphere of appearance; lives matter because they are to be valued equally.

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.

To me, believing that some correspondence intrinsically just is reference (not as a result of our operational and theoretical constraints, or our intentions, but as an ultimate metaphysical fact) amounts to a magical theory of reference. Reference itself becomes what Locke called a 'substantial form' (an entity which intrinsically belongs with a certain name) on such a view. Even if one is willing to contemplate such unexplainable metaphysical facts, the epistemological problems that accompany such a metaphysical view seem insuperable. For, assuming a world of mind- independent, discourse-independent entities (this is the presupposition of the view we are discussing), there are, as we have seen, many different 'correspondences' which represent possible or candidate reference relations (infinitely many, in fact, if there are infinitely many things in the universe).

To this man life is already as earnest and awful, and beautiful and terrible, as death.

The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth.

I see the situation of man in the world of planetary technicity not as an inexitricable and inescapable destiny, but I see the task of thought precisely in this, that within its own limits it helps man as such achieve a satisfactory relationship to the essence of technicity. National Socialism did indeed go in this direction. Those people, however, were far too poorly equipped for thought to arrive at a really explicit relationship to what is happening today and has been underway for the past 300 years.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

The Doctrine of Knowledge, apart from all special and definite knowing, proceeds immediately upon Knowledge itself, in the essential unity in which it recognises Knowledge as existing; and it raises this question in the first place - How this Knowledge can come into being, and what it is in its inward and essential Nature? The following must be apparent: - There is but One who is absolutely by and through himself, - namely, God; and God is not the mere dead conception to which we have thus given utterance, but he is in himself pure Life. He can neither change nor determine himself in aught within himself, nor become any other Being; for his Being contains within it all his Being and all possible Being, and neither within him nor out of him can any new Being arise.

May not we then confidently pronounce that man happy who realizes complete goodness in action, and is adequately furnished with external goods? Or should we add, that he must also be destined to go on living not for any casual period but throughout a complete lifetime in the same manner, and to die accordingly, because the future is hidden from us, and we conceive happiness as an end, something utterly and absolutely final and complete? If this is so, we shall pronounce those of the living who possess and are destined to go on possessing the good things we have specified to be supremely blessed, though on the human scale of bliss.

Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.

If thou intend to do any good; tarry not till to-morrow! for thou knowest not what may chance thee this night.

A whole dimension of human activity and passivity has been de-eroticized. The environment from which the individual could obtain pleasure-which he could cathect as gratifying almost as an extended zone of the body-has been rigidly reduced. Consequently, the "universe" of libidinous cathexis is likewise reduced. The effect is a localization and contraction of libido, the reduction of erotic to sexual experience and satisfaction.

It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours: The desert of the real itself.

"No man in this fashionable London of yours," friend Sauerteig would say, "speaks a plain word to me. Every man feels bound to be something more than plain; to be pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me;-perhaps (this is the commonest) to be topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember it the better! Such grinning inanity is very sad to the soul of man. Human faces should not grin on one like masks; they should look on one like faces! I love honest laughter, as I do sunlight; but not dishonest: most kinds of dancing too; but the St.-Vitus kind not at all! A fashionable wit, ach Himmel, if you ask, Which, he or a Death's- head, will be the cheerier company for me? pray send not him!"

Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always preceed causes in the actual developmental order.

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.

The End of the Life of Mankind on Earth is this,-that in this Life they may order all their relations with FREEDOM according to REASON.

Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait.

Among the things held to be just by law, whatever is proved to be of advantage in men's dealings has the stamp of justice, whether or not it be the same for all; but if a man makes a law and it does not prove to be mutually advantageous, then this is no longer just. And if what is mutually advantageous varies and only for a time corresponds to our concept of justice, nevertheless for that time it is just for those who do not trouble themselves about empty words, but look simply at the facts.

Even the most elevated psychological understanding is not a loving understanding.

Superstition is now in her turn cast down and trampled underfoot, whilst we by the victory are exalted high as heaven.

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.

All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.

There is only one way to science-or to philosophy... to meet a problem, to see its beauty and fall in love with it; to get married to it, and to live with it happily, till death do ye part-unless you should meet another... more fascinating problem, or... obtain a solution. But even if you do... you may... discover, to your delight, the... a whole family of enchanting... perhaps difficult problem children for whose welfare you may work, with a purpose, to the end of your days.

And to bring in a new word by the head and shoulders, they leave out the old one.

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

It was the addition of status that brought the little things: a more comfortable seat here, a better cut of meat there, a shorter wait in line at the other place. To the philosophical mind, these items might seem scarcely worth any great trouble to acquire.Yet no one, however philosophical, could give up those privileges, once acquired, without a pang. That was the point.

Liberalism... has a left of center meaning in the United States. It has a slightly right of center meaning in much of continental Europe.

In fact we do not know anything infallibly, but only that which changes according to the condition of our body and of the [influences] that reach and impinge upon it.

Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.

So far from a gradual progress towards perfection forming any necessary part of the Darwinian creed, it appears to us that it is perfectly consistent with indefinite persistence in one state, or with a gradual retrogression.