No moral system can rest solely on authority.

In an age of enormities, the emotions are naturally weakened. We are continually called upon to have feelings - about genocide, for instance, or about famine or the blowing up of passenger planes - and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately. A guilty consciousness of emotional inadequacy or impotence makes people doubt their own human weight.

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows.

Besides, you also have many Jews living in the country, who do much harm... You should know the Jews blaspheme and violate the name of our Savior day for day... for that reason you, Milords and men of authority, should not tolerate but expel them. They are our public enemies and incessantly blaspheme our Lord Jesus Christ, they call our Blessed Virgin Mary a harlot and her Holy Son a bastard and to us they give the epithet of changelings and abortions. Therefore deal with them harshly as they do nothing but excruciatingly blaspheme our Lord Jesus Christ, trying to rob us of our lives, our health, our honor and belongings.

One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature.

They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.

Regarded anatomically, the resemblances between the foot of Man and the foot of the Gorilla are far more striking and important than the differences. ...be the differences between the hand and foot of Man and those of the Gorilla what they may-the differences between those of the Gorilla and those of the lower Apes are much greater.

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

A man who has never been within the tropics does not know what a thunderstorm means; a man who has never looked on Niagara has but a faint idea of a cataract; and he who has not read Barère's Memoirs may be said not to know what it is to lie.

Even sticking to the higher plane of love, is it so very obvious that you can't love more than one person? We seem to manage it with parental love (parents are reproached if they don't at least pretend to love all their children equally), love of books, of food, of wine (love of Chateau Margaux does not preclude love of a fine Hock, and we don't feel unfaithful to the red when we dally with the white), love of composers, poets, holiday beaches, friends . . . why is erotic love the one exception that everybody instantly acknowledges without even thinking about it?

Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition - as we shall see, the two come to the same thing - the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor. But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.

The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.

...happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination, resting solely on empirical grounds.

A good judge condemns wrongful acts, but does not hate them.

Kant ... discovered "the scandal of reason," that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.

If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction.

Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

We ought neither to fasten our ship to one small anchor nor our life to a single hope.

Nothing in all literature is so depressing as the "Dissertations" of the slave [Epictetus], unless it be the "Meditations" of the Emperor [Marcus Aurelius] ...[after some excerpts from the two books]..... In such passages we feel the proximity of Christianity and its dauntless martyrs; indeed were not the Christian ethic of self-denial, the Christian political ideal of an almost communistic brotherhood of man, and the Christian eschatology of the final conflagration of all the world, fragments of Stoic doctrine floating on the stream of thought? In Epictetus the Greco-Roman soul has lost its paganism, and is ready for a new faith".

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just.

Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee.

Only charity admitteth no excess. For so we see, aspiring to be like God in power, the angels transgressed and fell.

Our western science is a child of moral virtues; and it must now become the father of further moral virtues if its extraordinary material triumphs in our time are not to bring human history to an abrupt, unpleasant and discreditable end.

God is the Immanent Cause of all things, never truly transcendent from them.

No one has the right to obey.

You have demanded of me, Novatus, that I should write how anger may be soothed, and it appears to me that you are right in feeling especial fear of this passion, which is above all others hideous and wild: for the others have some alloy of peace and quiet, but this consists wholly in action and the impulse of grief, raging with an utterly inhuman lust for arms, blood and tortures, careless of itself provided it hurts another, rushing upon the very point of the sword, and greedy for revenge even when it drags the avenger to ruin with itself.

Despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to drink, he recovered.

When I was 4 years old ... I dreamt that I'd been eaten by a wolf, and to my great surprise I was in the wolf's stomach and not in heaven.

The art of medicine has its roots in the heart. If your heart is false, then also the doctor in you is false. If it is fair, then also the doctor is fair.

There are hardly any truths upon which we always remain agreed, and still fewer objects of pleasure which we do not change every hour, I do not know whether there is a means of giving fixed rules for adapting discourse to the inconstancy of our caprices.

For love of bustle is not industry - it is only the restlessness of a hunted mind.

You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power - he's free again.

This is a strange -- and rather alarming -- realisation. For it clearly implies that masturbation is one of our highest faculties that human beings have developed. Many animals masturbate -- but never without the presence of another animal, or some similar stimulus. A human being can masturbate in an empty room: a triumph of pure imagination.

Do not let habit, born from experience, force you along this road, directing aimless eye and echoing ear and tongue; but judge by reason the much contested proof which I have spoken.

To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.

It is the fantasy of seizing reality live that continues-ever since Narcissus bent over his spring. Surprising the real in order to immobilize it, suspending the real in the expiration of its double. You bend over the hologram like God over his creature: only God has this power of passing through walls, through people, and finding Himself immaterially in the beyond. We dream of passing through ourselves and of finding ourselves in the beyond: the day when your holographic double will be there in space, eventually moving and talking, you will have realized this miracle. Of course, it will no longer be a dream, so its charm will be lost.

To me it seems clear that the descriptions of human life we find in the novels of Tolstoy or George Eliot are not mere entertainment; they teach us to perceive what goes on in social and individual life. And such descriptions require the many subtle distinctions that ordinary language has made available to us. The question of the relevance or irrelevance of "how we speak" is not just a question for philosophers, although it is that too. It is a question for philosophers because once ordinary language is laughed out of the room, philosophical theories are no longer held responsible at all to the ways we actually speak and actually live; but it is a question for more than just philosophers because, at bottom, contempt for ordinary language is contempt for all the humanities.

I long to be free - desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.

Our whole civilization, our entire culture is concentrated in the mad demand for the most perfected weapons of slaughter. Ammunition! Ammunition! O, Lord, thou who rulest heaven and earth, thou God of love, of mercy and of justice, provide us with enough ammunition to destroy our enemy. Such is the prayer which is ascending daily to the Christian heaven.

The way of Heaven and Earth may be completely declared in one sentence: They are without any doubleness, and so they produce things in a manner that is unfathomable.

Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.