Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics.

We find that everything that makes up difference and number is pure accident, pure show, pure constitution. Every production, of whatever kind, is an alteration, but the substance remains always the same, because it is only one, one divine immortal being.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.

By 'arguing...' I mean... criticizing... inviting... criticism; and trying to learn from it.

It may be observed, that provinces amid the vicissitudes to which they are subject, pass from order into confusion, and afterward recur to a state of order again; for the nature of mundane affairs not allowing them to continue in an even course, when they have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline. In the same manner, having been reduced by disorder, and sunk to their utmost state of depression, unable to descend lower, they, of necessity, reascend; and thus from good they gradually decline to evil, and from evil again return to good. The reason is, that valor produces peace; peace, repose; repose, disorder; disorder, ruin; so from disorder order springs; from order virtue, and from this, glory and good fortune.

Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Except are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love.

It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

Anything done against faith or conscience is sinful.

The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity... Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

That is precisely what we should have expected, since Genet wants to live simultaneously creation, destruction, the impossibility of destroying and the impossibility of creating, since he wants both to show his rejection of the divine creation and to manifest, in the absolute, human impotence as man's reproval of God and as the testimony of his grandeur.

Childish and altogether ludicrous is what you yourself are and all philosophers; and if a grown-up man like me spends fifteen minutes with fools of this kind, it is merely a way of passing the time. I've now got more important things to do. Goodbye!

I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.

At times the world sees straight, but many times the world goes astray.

The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is what? The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.

"Why do you not say how things will be operated under Anarchism?" is a question I have had to meet thousands of times. Because I believe that Anarchism can not consistently impose an iron-clad program or method on the future. The things every new generation has to fight, and which it can least overcome, are the burdens of the past, which holds us all as in a net. Anarchism, at least as I understand it, leaves posterity free to develop its own particular systems, in harmony with its needs. Our most vivid imagination can not foresee the potentialities of a race set free from external restraints. How, then, can any one assume to map out a line of conduct for those to come? We, who pay dearly for every breath of pure, fresh air, must guard against the tendency to fetter the future. If we succeed in clearing the soil from the rubbish of the past and present, we will leave to posterity the greatest and safest heritage of all ages.

As there must be moderation in other things, so there must be moderation in self-criticism. Perpetual contemplation of our own actions produces a morbid consciousness, quite unlike that normal consciousness accompanying right actions spontaneously done; and from a state of unstable equilibrium long maintained by effort, there is apt to be a fall towards stable equilibrium, in which the primitive nature reasserts itself. Retrogression rather than progression may hence result.

It might otherwise appear paradoxical that money can be replaced by worthless paper; but that the slightest alloying of its metallic content depreciates it.

The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted. The only self-renunciation which it applauds, is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means of happiness, of others; either of mankind collectively, or of individuals within the limits imposed by the collective interests of mankind.

Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives and dies. It is just as possible for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see in you a slave.

There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

(The end is) life in agreement with nature.

Animals destitute of reason live with their own kind in a state of social amity. Elephants herd together; sheep and swine feed in flocks; cranes and crows take their flight in troops; storks have their public meetings to consult previously to their emigration, and feed their parents when unable to feed themselves; dolphins defend each other by mutual assistance; and everybody knows, that both ants and bees have respectively established by general agreement, a little friendly community.

To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.

The world is so possessed by the power of what is and the efforts of adjustment to it, that the adolescent's rebellion, which once fought the father because his practices contradicted his own ideology, can no longer crop up. ... Psychologically, the father is ... replaced by the world of things.

The best way to describe anyone is to give an example of the kind of thing he would do.

In adversity, remember to keep an even mind.

The greatest saving one can make in the order of thought is to accept the unintelligibility of the world and to pay attention to man.

Or... they observe an astronomic phenomenon... an eclipse of the moon, and... suppose... this... is perceived simultaneously from all points of the earth. That is not altogether true, since the propagation of light is not instantaneous; if absolute exactitude were desired, there would be a correction... according to a complicated rule.

Nature, which alone is good, is wholly familiar and common.

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.

Intuitionism is not constructive, perfectionism is unacceptable.

Should the believers in special creations consider it unfair thus to call upon them to describe how special creations take place, I reply that this is far less than they demand from the supporters of the Development Hypothesis. They are merely asked to point out a conceivable mode. On the other hand, they ask, not simply for a conceivable mode, but for the actual mode.

Well both original seizure and subsequent critical discrimination have equal claims, each to its own complete development and must not be forgotten that direct and unreasoned impression comes first. There is such occasions something of the quality of the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Sometimes it comes and sometimes it does not, even in the presence of the same object. It cannot be forced and when it does not arrive it is not wise to seek to recover by direct action the first fine rapture.

Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

The value which the workmen add to the materials, therefore, resolves itself in this case into two parts, of which the one pays their wages, the other the profits of the employer upon the whole stock of materials and wages which he advanced.

You will next read the new testament. It is the history of a personage called Jesus. Keep in your eye the opposite pretensions 1. of those who say he was begotten by God, born of a virgin, suspended & reversed the laws of nature at will, & ascended bodily into heaven: and 2. of those who say he was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions to divinity, ended in believing them, & was Punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law which punished the first commission of that offence by whipping, & the second by exile or death in furcâ.

There are two great fundamental problems common to all thought: (i) the problem of world- and life-affirmation and world- and life-negation, and (2) the problem of ethics and the relations between ethics and these two forms of man's spiritual attitude to Being.

I must also call your attention to the fact that it is crucial for my viewpoint that human behavior is to a large extent charged with a considerable amount of energy, but that in contrast to Freud I do not consider this energy to be sexual, but the vital energy within any organism which, according to biological laws, gives man the desire to live, and that means to adapt himself to the social necessities of his society. To go back to what I consider to be the misunderstanding, it has never been my position that society only deforms or manifests that which is already there. If we make the distinction between human necessities in general and human desires in particular then indeed, society creates particular desires which, however, follow the general laws of the necessities rooted in human nature.

Such arguments ill become us, since the time of reformation came, under Gospel light. All distinctions of nations, and privileges of one above others, are ceased; Christians are taught to account all men their neighbours; and love their neighbours as themselves; and do to all men as they would be done by; to do good to all men; and Man-stealing is ranked with enormous crimes. Is the barbarous enslaving our inoffensive neighbours, and treating them like wild beasts subdued by force, reconcilable with all these Divine precepts? Is this doing to them as we would desire they should do to us? If they could carry off and enslave some thousands of us, would we think it just?-One would almost wish they could for once; it might convince more than Reason, or the Bible.

Nothing of the All is either empty or superfluous.