The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.

Here and everywhere is the struggle for existence, life inextricably enmeshed with war. All life living at the expense of life, every organism eating other organisms forever.

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter; for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.

When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.

In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler. The poor swearing soldier, hired to be shot, has his "honor of a soldier," different from drill-regulations and the shilling a day. It is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's Heaven as a god-made Man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease.

This language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood.

I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property..a means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.

We do not have and cannot have any means of discovering whether or not we are carried along in a uniform motion of translation.

And all the time - such is the tragi-comedy of our situation - we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more "drive", or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or "creativity". In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

The strengthening of behavior which results from reinforcement is appropriately called "conditioning". In operant conditioning we "strengthen" an operant in the sense of making a response more probable or, in actual fact, more frequent.

Visual space is the space of detachment. Audile-tactile space is the space of involvement.

Delay is preferable to error.

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.

Whence we see spiders, flies, or ants entombed and preserved forever in amber, a more than royal tomb.

Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.

I go into the Upanishads to ask questions.

The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...

What if the equality between us human being, in which we completely resemble one another, were that none of us really thinks about his being loved?

If you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. This is the inductive method.

To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.

It is more shameful to distrust our friends than to be deceived by them.

Life is a disease of the spirit; a working incited by Passion. Rest is peculiar to the spirit.

It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.

Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?

Reviewing what you have learned and learning anew, you are fit to be a teacher.

To understand oneself in existence is the Christian principle, except that this self has received much richer and much more profound qualifications that are even more difficult to understand together with existing. The believer is a subjective thinker, and the difference, is only between the simple person and the simple wise person. Here again the oneself is not humanity in general, subjectivity in general, and other such things, whereas everything becomes easy inasmuch as the difficulty is removed and the whole matter is shifted over into the shadow play of abstraction.

I should not be surprized at seeing a French Army conveyed by a British Navy to an attack upon this Kingdom.

There are uncertain truths - even true statements that we may take to be false - but there are no uncertain certainties. Since we can never know anything for sure, it is simply not worth searching for certainty; but it is well worth searching for truth; and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we have to correct them.

We are weak, watery beings standing in the midst of unrealities; therefore let us turn our minds to the things that are everlasting.

This I know, that between finite and infinite there is no comparison; so that the difference between God and the greatest and most excellent created thing is no less than the difference between God and the least created thing.

They pass peaceful lives who ignore mine and thine.

It is always necessary that the substance or essence of a person be good before there can be any good works and that good works follow and proceed from a person who is already good. Christ says in Matthew 7:18: "A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit." ... The fruit does not make the tree good or bad but the tree itself is what determines the nature of the fruit. In the same way, a person first must be good or bad before doing a good or bad work.

In the process of decision those alternatives are chosen which are considered to be appropriate means of reaching desired ends. Ends themselves, however, are often merely instrumental to more final objectives. We are thus led to the conception of a series, or hierarchy, of ends. Rationality has to do with the construction of means-ends chains of this kind.

All law relations are determined by this principle: each one must restrict his freedom by the possibility of the freedom of the other. ... My freedom is limited by the freedom of the other only on condition that he limits his freedom by the conception of mine. Otherwise he is lawless. Hence, if a law-relation is to result from my cognition of the other, the cognition and the consequent limitation of freedom must have been mutual. All law-relation between persons is, therefore, conditioned by their mutual cognition of each other, and is, at the same time, completely determined thereby.

It is often better for a person to recognize a sin than to do a good deed. Recognizing a sin makes a person humble. Doing a good deed often can feed a person's pride.

Saying is one thing and doing is another.

Science may fall back on its stupid excuse that science works for science, and that when it has been developed by the scientists it will become accessible to the people also; but art, if it be art, should be accessible to all, and particularly to those for whom it is produced. And the position of our art strikingly arraigns the producers of art for not wishing, not knowing how, and being unable, to serve the people.

Mahomet himself, after all that can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments, - nay on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride that he would mend his own shoes, patch his own cloak. A poor, hard-toiling, ill-provided man; careless of what vulgar men toil for.

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, - mettle and bottom.

We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on...

The blame rests with the government. Why do they not put adulterers to death? Then I would not need to give such advice. Between two evils one is always the lesser, in this case allowing the adulterer to remarry in a distant land in order to avoid fornication . . .

With the conception that the Revolution was only a means of securing political power, it was inevitable that all revolutionary values should be subordinated to the needs of the Socialist State; indeed, exploited to further the security of the newly acquired governmental power.

The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.

Of all the animals kept by the farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocale, was,thenceforth, the most oppressed, the worst nourished, the most brutally treated.

Do the essences of proposition and of the truth determine themselves from out of the essence of the thing, or does the essence of the thing determine itself from out of the essence of the proposition? The question is posed as an either/or. However does this either/or itself suffice? Are the essence of the thing and the essence of the proposition only built as mirror images because both of them together determine themselves from out of the same but deeper lying root? However, what and where can be this common ground for the essence of the thing and of the proposition and of their origin? The unconditioned (Unbedingt)? We stated at the beginning that what conditions the essense of the thing in its thingness can no longer itself be thing and conditioned, it must be an unconditioned (Un-bedingtes).

I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.