Desire, to know why, and how, CURIOSITY; such as is in no living creature but Man; so that Man is distinguished, not only by his Reason; but also by this singular Passion from other Animals; in whom the appetite of food, and other pleasures of Sense, by predominance, take away the care of knowing causes; which is a Lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of Knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal Pleasure.

Remember that it is not he who gives abuse or blows who affronts, but the view we take of these things as insulting. When, therefore, any one provokes you, be assured that it is your own opinion which provokes you.

Whatever you can lose, you should reckon of no account.

Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.

Cato said the best way to keep good acts in memory was to refresh them with new.

The slaving Poor are incapable of any Principles: Gentlemen may be converted to true Principles, by Time and Experience. The middling Rank of Men have Curiosity and Knowledge enough to form Principles, but not enough to form true ones, or correct any Prejudices that they may have imbib'd: And 'tis among the middling Rank, that Tory Principles do at present prevail most in England.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.

It is an odd circumstance that neither the old nor the new, by itself, is interesting; the absolutely old is insipid; the absolutely new makes no appeal at all. The old in the new is what claims the attention,-the old with a slightly new turn.

Fame and wealth without wisdom are unsafe possessions.

No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity; - for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.

The person who is going to preach ought to live in the Christian thoughts and ideas: they ought to be his daily life. If so, this is the view of Christianity, then you, too, will have eloquence enough and precisely that which is needed when you speak extemporaneously without specific preparation. However, it is fallacious eloquence if someone, without otherwise occupying himself with, without living in these thoughts, once in a while sits down and laboriously collects such thoughts, perhaps in the field of literature, and then works them into a well-composed discourse, which is then committed to memory and delivered superbly, with respect both to voice and diction and gestures.

For him who loves labor, there is always something to do.

All true metaphysics is taken from the essential nature of the thinking faculty itself, and therefore in nowise invented, since it is not borrowed from experience, but contains the pure operations of thought, that is, conceptions and principles à priori, which the manifold of empirical presentations first of all brings into legitimate connection, by which it can become empirical knowledge, i.e. experience. ...mathematical physicists were thus quite unable to dispense with such metaphysical principles...

Abstract terms (however useful they may be in argument) should be discarded in meditation, and the mind should be fixed on the particular and the concrete, that is, on the things themselves.

A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.

Men have been released from [concentration] camps who have taken over the jargon of their jailers and with cold reason and mad consent (the price, as it were, of their survival) tell their story as if it could not have been otherwise than it was, contending that they have not been treated so badly after all.

When truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.

I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

If you fast, you will give rise to sin for yourselves; and if you pray, you will be condemned; and if you give alms, you will do harm to your spirits. When you go into any land and walk about in the districts, if they receive you, eat what they will set before you, and heal the sick among them. For what goes into your mouth will not defile you, but that which issues from your mouth—it is that which will defile you.

Neither art nor wisdom may be attained without learning.

In capitalist society however where social reason always asserts itself only post festum great disturbances may and must constantly occur.

Is dogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact for claiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable? And if not, what command over truth would this kind of theology really lose if, instead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable probability for her conclusions? If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err.

Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle - they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.

The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can.

The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do.

Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.

We cannot think first and act afterwards. From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

One reason an egalitarian approach to the value of life is important is that it draws from ideals of radical democracy at the same time that it enters into ethical considerations about how best to practice nonviolence. The institutional life of violence will not be brought down by a prohibition, but only by a counter-institutional ethos and practice.

Money often costs too much.

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.

The immeasurable beauty of life is a very fine thing to write about, and there are, indeed, some who resign themselves to accept it and accept it as it is, and even some who would persuade us that there is no problem in the "trap." But it has been said by Calderón that "to seek to persuade a man that the misfortunes which he suffers are not misfortunes, does not console him for them, but it is another misfortune in addition." And furthermore, "only the heart can speak to the heart," as Fray Diego de Estella said.

And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations.

The wise man is joyful, happy and calm, unshaken, he lives on a plane with the gods.

Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.

A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.

The roots of education ... are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

He who discommendeth others obliquely commendeth himself.

He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.

The law of simplicity and naïveté applies to all fine art, for it is compatible with what is most sublime. True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself; that is, it consists in his correctly distinguishing between what is necessary and what is superfluous. On the other hand, one should never sacrifice clearness, to say nothing of grammar, for the sake of being brief. To impoverish the expression of a thought, or to obscure or spoil the meaning of a period for the sake of using fewer words shows a lamentable want of judgment.

Attention spans get very weak at the speed of light, and that goes along with a very weak identity.

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

For the purpose of acquiring gain, everything else is pushed aside or thrown overboard, for example, as is philosophy by the professors of philosophy.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.