To one who asked what was the proper time for lunch, he said, "If a rich man, when you will; if a poor man, when you can." Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 40

If now I...say "Stealing money is wrong," I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning - that is, expresses no proposition which can be either true or false. It is as if I had written "Stealing money!!" - where the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed.

Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided.

Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist-I really believe he is Antichrist-I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful slave,' as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened you-sit down and tell me all the news.

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

...if the Catholick religion is destroyd by the Infidels, it is a most contemptible and absurd Idea, that, this, or any Protestant Church, can survive that Event. ... in Ireland particularly, the R[oman] C[atholic] Religion should be upheld in high respect and veneration. ... I am more serious on the positive encouragement to be given to this religion...because the serious and earnest belief and practice of it by its professors forms, as things stand, the most effectual Barrier, if not the sole Barrier, against Jacobinism.

I should not really object to dying if it were not followed by death.

If there is no immortality, there is no virtue. ... Without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then, they can do what they like?

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, "Repent," he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular way, ought to give us ground to presume ability.

All laws are... deduced from experiment; but to enunciate them, a special language is needful... ordinary language is too poor...This... is one reason why the physicist can not do without mathematics; it furnishes him the only language he can speak. And a well-made language is no indifferent thing;...the analyst, who pursues a purely esthetic aim, helps create, just by that, a language more fit to satisfy the physicist....law springs from experiment, but not immediately. Experiment is individual, the law deduced from it is general; experiment is only approximate, the law is precise...In a word, to get the law from experiment, it is necessary to generalize... But how generalize? ...in this choice what shall guide us?It can only be analogy. ...What has taught us to know the true profound analogies, those the eyes do not see but reason divines?It is the mathematical spirit, which disdains matter to cling only to pure form.

More controversially, technology can accelerate the transition from harming to helping free-living sentient beings: mankind's fitfully expanding "circle of compassion". The civilising process needn't be species-specific but instead extend to free-living dwellers in tomorrow's wildlife parks. Every cubic metre of the biosphere will soon be computationally accessible to surveillance, micro-management and control. Fertility regulation via immunocontraception can replace Darwinian ecosystems governed by starvation and predation. Any species of obligate carnivore we choose to preserve can be genetically and behaviourally tweaked into harmlessness. Asphyxiation, disembowelling, and agonies of being eaten alive can pass into the dustbin of history.

All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

The sham cause in physical influence consists in rashly assuming that the commerce of substance and transitive forces is sufficiently knowable from their mere existence. Hence it is not so much a system as rather the neglect of all philosophical system as a superfluity in the argument. Freeing the concept from this defect, we shall have a species of commerce alone deserving to be called real, and from which the whole constituting the world merits being called real, and not ideal or imaginary.

The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists in the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself.

One always dies too soon - or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

During such calm sunshine of the mind, these spectres of false divinity never make their appearance.

No effective blueprint [of a political alternative to Empire] will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours.

When Alexander the Great addressed him with greetings, and asked if he wanted anything, Diogenes replied "Yes, stand a little out of my sunshine."

While the Marxist faith in central planning is now confined to a few dingy sects, a quasi-religious belief in free markets continues to shape the policies of governments.Many writers have pointed to the havoc and ruin that have accompanied the imposition of free markets across the world. Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or post-communist Europe, policies of wholesale privatisation and structural adjustment have led to declining economic activity and social dislocation on a massive scale.

Well, it was healthy to miss once in a while. It kept self-confidence balanced at a point safely short of arrogance.

The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration.

So that it will be found that the fundamental fault in the character of women is that they have no "sense of justice ." This arises from their deficiency in the power of reasoning already referred to, and reflection, but is also partly due to the fact that Nature has not destined them, as the weaker sex, to be dependent on strength but on cunning; this is why they are instinctively crafty, and have an ineradicable tendency to lie.

If it were not for the founder of the school, Charles S. Pierce, who has told us that he 'learned philosophy out of Kant,' one might be tempted to deny any philosophical pedigree to a doctrine that holds not that our expectations are fulfilled and our actions successful because our ideas are true, but rather that our ideas are true because our expectations are fulfilled and our actions successful. describing the pragmatist view,

The law of nature teaches me to speak in my own defence: With respect to this charge of bribery I am as innocent as any man born on St. Innocents Day. I never had a bribe or reward in my eye or thought when pronouncing judgment or order. I am ready to make an oblation of myself to the King.

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen.

In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance.

Singing is of a lover.

Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries-a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends.

It was under Catholic Feudalism that they were first united; a union for which their incorporation into the Roman empire had prepared them, and which was finally organized by the incomparable genius of Charlemagne.

The third kind of life is the life of contemplation.

Someone once asked me, "If you had your choice, Dr. Asimov, would it be women or writing?" My answer was, "Well, I can write for twelve hours at a time without getting tired."

Rules necessary for demonstrations. To prove all propositions, and to employ nothing for their proof but axioms fully evident of themselves, or propositions already demonstrated or admitted; Never to take advantage of the ambiguity of terms by failing mentally to substitute definitions that restrict or explain them.

Do not repeat slander; you should not hear it, for it is the result of hot temper.

Encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of power) is statutorily a language of repetition; all official institutions of language are repeating machines: schools, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words.

Of practical wisdom these are the three fruits: to deliberate well, to speak to the point, to do what is right.

I bequeath my soul to God (...). My body to be buried obscurely. For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next age.

At that moment he knew what his mother was thinking, and that she loved him. But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little; or, rather, that love is never wrong enough to find the word befitting it.

No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.

Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself; do not permit the fact that you have been set apart from life in a way, been prevented from participating actively in it, and that you are superflous in the obtruse eyes of a busy world, above all, do not permit this to deprive you of your idea of yourself, as if your life, if lived in inwardness, did not have just as much meaning and worth as that of any human being in the eyes of all-wise Governance, and considerably more than the busy, busiest haste of busy-ness - busy with wasting life and losing itself.

Some will object that the Law is divine and holy. Let it be divine and holy. The Law has no right to tell me that I must be justified by it.

Whatever bitterness and hate may be found in the movements which we are to examine, it is not bitterness or hate, but love, that is their mainspring. It is difficult not to hate those who torture the objects of our love. Though difficult, it is not impossible; but it requires a breadth of outlook and a comprehensiveness of understanding which are not easy to preserve amid a desperate contest. If ultimate wisdom has not always been preserved by Socialists and Anarchists, they have not differed in this from their opponents; and in the source of their inspiration they have shown themselves superior to those who acquiesce ignorantly or supinely in the injustices and oppressions by which the existing system is preserved.

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.

Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain.

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.

Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.

Philosophy was never just ontotheology, and even when philosophers were concerned with ontotheology, they were concerned with much more than that. That is the first reason that the idea of a fundamental "crisis" in philosophy and of the "end of philosophy" is deeply mistaken. And if the questions of philosophy are indeed "unsettleable," in the sense that they will always be with us, that is a wonderful thing, not something to be regretted.

Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance. It spread across the Western world, not because it was true, but because humans are gullible and superstitious.

Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was - nobody any longer wanted to be that.