Just as a vagrant accused of stealing a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

You are doing an excellent thing, one which will be wholesome for you, if, as you write me, you are persisting in your effort to attain sound understanding; it is foolish to pray for this when you can acquire it from yourself. We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol's ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. A god is near you, with you, and in you. This is what I mean, Lucilius: there sits a holy spirit within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our a guardian.

Nothing lasts forever, few things even last for long: all are susceptible of decay in one way or another; moreover all that begins also ends.

There are all kinds of sources of our knowledge; but none has authority ... The fundamental mistake made by the philosophical theory of the ultimate sources of our knowledge is that it does not distinguish clearly enough between questions of origin and questions of validity.

God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor.

No epoch is homogeneous; whatever you may have assigned as the dominant note of a considerable period, it will always be possible to produce men, and great men, belonging to the same time, who exhibit themselves as antagonistic to the tone of their age.

In speaking of the move from subjective to objective characterization, I wish to remain noncommittal about the existence of an endpoint, the completely objective intrinsic nature of the thing, which one might or might not be able to reach. It may be more accurate to think of objectivity as a direction in which the understanding can travel. And in understanding a phenomenon like lightning, it is legitimate to go as far away as one can from a strictly human viewpoint.But in the case of experience, on the other hand, the connexion with a particular point of view seems much closer. It is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?

The only justification for our concepts and system of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy. I am convinced that the philosophers have had a harmful effect upon the progress of scientific thinking in removing certain fundamental concepts from the domain of empiricism, where they are under our control, to the intangible heights of the a priori. For even if it should appear that the universe of ideas cannot be deduced from experience by logical means, but is, in a sense, a creation of the human mind, without which no science is possible, nevertheless the universe of ideas is just as little independent of the nature of our experience as clothes are of the form of the human body. This is particularly true of our concepts of time and space, which physicists have been obliged by the facts to bring down from the Olympus of the a priori in order to adjust them and put them in a serviceable condition.

Wish not the thing, which thou mayest not obtain!

Whatever the explicit strategic or political aims of a war may be, they prove to be weak in comparison with its aims of destruction; what war destroys first are the very restrictions imposed on destructive license. If we can rightly speak about the unstated "aim" of war, it is neither primarily to alter the political landscape nor to establish a new political order, but rather to destroy the social basis of politics itself.

The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure.

We are not simple people who believe in happiness; nor weaklings who crumple to the ground in distress at the first reverse; nor skeptics observing the bloody effort of marching humanity from the lofty heights of a mocking, sterile wit. Believing in the fight, though we entertain no illusions about it, we are armed against every disappointment.

The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.

Our people... will give you all the necessaries of war they produce, if, instead of the bankrupt trash they now are obliged to receive for want of any other, you will give them a paper promise funded on a specific pledge, and of a size for common circulation.

We may with advantage at times forget what we know.

There are no conventions, no tabus, no gods, no priests, princes, fathers, or revelations which they must accept. ... The prison door is wide open. They stagger out into trackless space under a blinding sun.

Since the Devil is the adversary of Christ he should occupy a position equivalent to his and be the Son of God as well. Satan would be the first Son of God and Christ the second.

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.

Almost as soon as I began to study philosophy, I was impressed by the way in which philosophical problems appeared, disappeared, or changed shape, as a result of new assumptions or vocabularies.

Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.

Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.

States are doomed when they are unable to distinguish good men from bad.

It is the privilege of true genius, and certainly of the genius that opens a new road, to make without punishment great mistakes.

Cicero said loud-bawling orators were driven by their weakness to noise, as lame men to take horse.

What strikes one here above all is the crudely empirical conception of profit derived from the outlook of the ordinary capitalist, which wholly contradicts the better esoteric understanding of Adam Smith.

Theory is taught so as to make the student believe that he or she can become a Marxist, a feminist, an Afrocentrist, or a deconstructionist with about the same effort and commitment required in choosing items from a menu.

Photography and cinema contributed in large part to the secularization of history, to fixing it in its visible, "objective" form at the expense of the myths that once traversed it. Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.

The refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.

The virtues are not poured into us, they are natural. Seek, and you will find them: neglect, and you will lose them.

This enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation. It shall have all my prayers, & these are the only weapons of an old man.

From the nature and purpose of civil institutions, all the lands within the limits which any particular society has circumscribed around itself are assumed by that society, and subject to their allotment only. This may be done by themselves, assembled collectively, or by their legislature, to whom they may have delegated sovereign authority; and if they are alloted in neither of these ways, each individual of the society may appropriate to himself such lands as he finds vacant, and occupancy will give him title.

To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.

The might which kills outright is an elementary and coarse form of might. How much more varied in its devices; how much more astonishing in its effects is that other which does not kill; or which delays killing.

Scientists try to eliminate their false theories, they try to let them die in their stead. The believer-whether animal or man-perishes with his false beliefs.

Why may not a goose say thus: "All the parts of the universe I have an interest in: the earth serves me to walk upon, the sun to light me; the stars have their influence upon me; I have such an advantage by the winds and such by the waters; there is nothing that yon heavenly roof looks upon so favourably as me. I am the darling of Nature! Is it not man that keeps and serves me?"

The lot assigned to every man is suited to him, and suits him to itself.

A utopia of judicial reticence: take away life, but prevent the patient from feeling it; deprive the prisoner of all rights, but do not inflict pain; impose penalties free of all pain. Recourse to psycho-pharmacology and to various physiological 'disconnectors', even if it is temporary, is a logical consequence of this 'non-corporal' penalty.

How it could come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a sense of the whole. I only know that I was the cause of their sin and downfall. Like a vile trichina, like a germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so I contaminated all this earth, so happy and sinless before my coming. They learnt to lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm of falsehood.

The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk; but divert your attention by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far. The Europeans value themselves on having subdued the horse to the uses of man; but I doubt whether we have not lost more than we have gained, by the use of this animal. No one has occasioned so much, the degeneracy of the human body. An Indian goes on foot nearly as far in a day, for a long journey, as an enfeebled white does on his horse; and he will tire the best horses. There is no habit you will value so much as that of walking far without fatigue.

Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other.

The discussion of the sexual problem is only a somewhat crude prelude to a far deeper question, and that is the question of the psychological relationship between the sexes. In comparison with this the other pales into insignificance, and with it we enter the real domain of woman. Woman's psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos.

The endeavor to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless.

We should always speak what would please the man of whom we expect a favour, like the hunter who sings sweetly when he desires to shoot a deer.

Perhaps, if prematurely we dismiss ourselves from this world, all may even have to be suffered through again - the premature birth may not contribute to the production of another being, which must be begun again from the beginning.

Effort supposes resistance.

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