Friends, the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest harvests.

But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about.

We were ensnared by the wisdom of the serpent; we are set free by the foolishness of God.

For it is not the bare Words, but the Scope of the writer that giveth true light, by which any writing is to bee interpreted; and they that insist upon single Texts, without considering the main Designe, can derive no thing from them clearly; but rather by casting atomes of Scripture, as dust before mens eyes, make everything more obscure than it is; an ordinary artifice of those who seek not the truth, but their own advantage.

All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.

The Quaestor turned back the pages until he found himself among the Pensées. "We are not satisfied," he read, "with the life we have in ourselves and our own being; we want to live an imaginary life in other people's idea of us. Hence all our efforts are directed to seeming what we are not. We labor incessantly to preserve and embellish this imaginary being, and neglect that which is really ours." The Quaestor put down the book, ... and ruefully reflected that all his own troubles had arisen from this desire to seem what in fact he was not. To seem a man of action, when in fact he was a contemplative; to seem a politician, when nature had made him an introspective psychologist; to seem a wit, which God had intended him for a sage.

The charlatan takes very different shapes according to circumstances; but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish and material.

There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom. 

The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.

A wise man rules his passions, a fool obeys them.

I am grateful for what I am & have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety. I am ready to try this for the next 1000 years, & exhaust it. How sweet to think of! My extremities well charred, and my intellectual part too, so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it - for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.

It would be worth the while to look closely into the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours, and in such solitudes, its dull, yellowish, greenish eye. Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green.

Modem mainstream economic theory bravely assumes that people make their decisions in such a way as to maximize their utility. Accepting this assumption enables economics to predict a great deal of behavior (correctly or incorrectly) without ever making empirical studies of human actors.

To recognize this clearly is enough to drive a man out of his senses or to make him shoot himself. And this is just what does happen, and especially often among military men. A man need only come to himself for an instant to be impelled inevitably to such an end.

Reason ... contradicts the established order of men and things on behalf of existing societal forces that reveal the irrational character of this order - for "rational" is a mode of thought and action which is geared to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression.

May we not say, perhaps, that the evil man is annihilated because he wished to be annihilated, or that he did not wish strongly enough to eternalize himself because he was evil? May we say that it is not believing in the other life which causes a man to be good, but rather that being good causes him believe in it? And what is being good and being evil? These states belong to the sphere of ethics, not of religion; or rather, does not the doing good though being evil pertain to ethics, and the being good [forgivable] though doing evil, to religion?

Above all things reverence thy Self.

I would rather sleep in the southern corner of a little country churchyard, than in the tombs of the Capulets.

No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

Thus, where'er the drift of hazardSeems most unrestrained to flow,Chance herself is reined and bitted,And the curb of law doth know.

What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them?

Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and daemons.

Technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into the realm of commodity production and exchange. But no matter how controlled the mobilization of instinctual energy may be (it sometimes amounts to a scientific management of libido), no matter how much it may serve as a prop for the status quo-it is also gratifying to the managed individuals, just as racing the outboard motor, pushing the power lawn mower, and speeding the automobile are fun.

In the state of nature, wrong-doing is impossible ; or, if anyone does wrong, it is to himself, not to another. For no one by the law of nature is bound to please another, unless he chooses, nor to hold anything to be good or evil, but what he himself, according to his own temperament, pronounces to be so ; and, to speak generally, nothing is forbidden by the law of nature, except what is beyond everyone's power.

Body and soul: a horse harnessed beside an ox.

A genius and an Apostle are qualitatively different, they are definitions which each belong in their own spheres: the sphere of immanence, and the sphere of transcendence.

May we not return to those scoundrels of old, the illustrious founders of superstition and fanaticism, who first took the knife from the altar to make victims of those who refused to be their disciples?

This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

Thus the social position of women is in this respect very similar to that of philosophers and of the working classes. And we now see why these three elements should be united. It is their combined action which constitutes the moral or modifying force of society.

As for large landed property, its defenders have always, sophistically, identified the economic advantages offered by large-scale agriculture with large-scale landed property, as if it were not precisely as a result of the abolition of property that this advantage, for one thing, would receive its greatest possible extension, and, for another, only then would be of social benefit.

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

A grievous crime indeed against religion has been committed by the man who imagines that Islam is defended by the denial of the mathematical sciences.

There is, nevertheless, a certain respect and a general duty of humanity that ties us, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even to trees and plants.

That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other. 

Only the skilled can judge the skilfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.

I have enough to eat till my hunger is stayed, to drink till my thirst is sated; to clothe myself withal; and out of doors not Callias there, with all his riches, is more safe than I from shivering; and when I find myself indoors, what warmer shirting do I need than my bare walls? what ampler greatcoat than the tiles above my head?

To hope is to contradict the future.

Even pacifist agitation or the nation-wide fever of big sports competitions acts as a spur to war fever in circumstances like ours. Any kind of excitement or emotion contributes to the possibility of dangerous explosions when the feelings of huge populations are kept inflamed even in peacetime for the sake of the advancement of commerce. Headlines mean street sales. It takes emotion to move merchandise. And wars and rumors of wars are the merchandise and also the emotion of the popular press.

Fear of evil is greater than the evil itself.

The new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied on with confidence and certainty.

To this I answer: That force is to be opposed to nothing, but to unjust and unlawful force. Whoever makes any opposition in any other case, draws on himself a just condemnation, both from God and man...

Wise people are in want of nothing, and yet need many things. On the other hand, nothing is needed by fools, for they do not understand how to use anything, but are in want of everything.

I shall in no time forget that moment. We felt as if we had had in our souls a clear passing glimpse into this wondrous World.

If insistence on them tends to unsettle established systems ... self-evident truths are by most people silently passed over; or else there is a tacit refusal to draw from them the most obvious inferences.

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

A man of understanding has lost nothing, if he has himself.