I come out as if...

I come out as if there were no hours in the days, nor planets in the hours; Neither do I care for any thing, but that interlude of Perendenga in Michael Cervantes: Let the old Man my Master live, and Christ be with us thus all. Thou wilt wonder now where this drives, Conde de lemos, nor a cardinal to pray for.

From the moment of his...

From the moment of his self-dedication, when he threw His cares away, and went forth not knowing where to lay his head, the whole energy which others spend on interests of their own was poured into his humane and divine affections, and filled his life with an enthusiasm resistless and unique. However quiet his words, it is impossible not to feel the tender depths from which they come.

When scientists take part in...

When scientists take part in activity they transform themselves from scientists into acting beings, that is, they become elements, data, facts; as soon as they reflect on their activity, however, they are re-transformed into scientists. The trained specialist qua scientist looks upon himself as a chain of judgments and inferences; qua member of society, he regard himself as a mere object. The same holds for everyone. The individual is divided into innumerable functions, the interconnection of which are unknown. In society a man is pater familias under one aspect, business man under another, thinker under a third; to be more precise, he is not a human being at all, but all these aspects and many more in an inevitable succession.

If a man is mistaken,...

If a man is mistaken, instruct him kindly and show him his error. But if thou art not able, blame thyself, or blame not even thyself.

Our labour preserves us from...

Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.

Read day and night, devour...

Read day and night, devour books — these sleeping pills — not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

I suppose the body to...

I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth, which God forms with the explicit intention of making it as much as possible like us.

It is a most earnest...

It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world; to die is not sport for a man. Man's life never was a sport to him; it was a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!

"I conclude that all is...

"I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

Abstinence from all injustice to...

Abstinence from all injustice to other first-rate powers is a greater tower of strength than anything that can be gained by the sacrifice of permanent tranquillity for an apparent temporary advantage.

Similarly, societies where news is...

Similarly, societies where news is censored cannot enjoy the luxury of false objectivity because they do not have the true variety. In free civilizations, false objectivity must be fought by true objectivity, not by some alien bureaucracy. Prejudiced history is eliminated, or at least combated, by serious history, and corrupt journalism can only be defeated by honest journalism, not by a government commission whose first act may be to distribute some secret subsidies.

Every philosophical, ethical, and political...

Every philosophical, ethical, and political idea—its lifeline connecting it with its historical origins having been severed—has a tendency to become the nucleus of a new mythology, and this is one of the reasons why the advance of enlightenment tends at certain points to revert to superstition and paranoia. The majority principle … has become the sovereign force to which thought must cater. It is a new god, not in the sense in which the heralds of the great revolutions conceived it, namely, as a power of resistance to existing injustice, but as a power of resistance to anything that does not conform.

Have I done something for...

Have I done something for the general interest? Well then I have had my reward. Let this always be present to thy mind, and never stop doing such good.

All joys do not cause...

All joys do not cause laughter; great pleasures are serious: pleasures of love do not make us laugh.

Nothing surpasses the pleasures of...

Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.

Enjoying things which are pleasant;...

Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.

What is a rebel? A...

What is a rebel? A man who says no.

That war is an evil...

That war is an evil is a proposition so familiar to every one that it would be tedious to develop it. No one is forced to engage in it by ignorance, or kept out of it by fear, if he fancies there is anything to be gained by it.

Through a vicious circle of...

Through a vicious circle of pure reason skepsis itself becomes dogma.

Whatever happens to you has...

Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happen to you.

The art of praising caused...

The art of praising caused the art of pleasing.

Life creates itself in delirium...

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

Yes, truly, it is a...

Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means!

To be happy, we must...

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

Lakshmi, the Goddess of wealth,...

Lakshmi, the Goddess of wealth, comes of Her own accord where fools are not respected, grain is well stored up, and the husband and wife do not quarrel.

The fire i th' flint...

The fire i th' flint Shows not till it be struck

In many cases it is...

In many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on.

Trust not him with your...

Trust not him with your secrets, who, when left alone in your room, turns over your papers.

Marcus Aurelius does not direct...

Marcus Aurelius does not direct his reflections to others but only to himself. The “”Memoirs“” are not a lesson for an ideal or real disciple (as Seneca's “'Letters to Lucilius”' were), but a continuous effort to remind “'himself”' of the philosophical cornerstones that alone can guarantee him serenity and inner peace. They therefore have a dramatic tone that is lacking in other ancient and modern moral works. Marcus Aurelius' interlocutor is only himself: Marcus Aurelius, emperor and man. Only within himself does he believe he can find the law of truth and goodness. Seeking solitude is useless, he says; one must withdraw into oneself because only in the depths of one's soul can tranquillity and truth be found. This attitude, which was adopted by the Christian world, is the fundamental leitmotif of Marcus Aurelius's “Memoirs”. In himself, man finds the reason with which divine providence has ordered the universe, and the criterion of truth and moral conduct. But by withdrawing into himself, man does not find himself in isolation: reason binds him to all men with whom he shares it.

No snowflake in an avalanche...

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

If there is anyone who...

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

"Understanding being nothing else, but...

"Understanding being nothing else, but conception caused by Speech."

Adversity is sometimes hard upon...

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

Some of the dissident young...

Some of the dissident young look abroad for models. They are attracted by the writing of the French novelist Albert Camus, who, in his conflict between his Algerian birth and his intellectual allegiance to France, expressed some of the conflict they feel; but he is dead.

Now, that we do not...

Now, that we do not really know of what sort each thing is, or is not, has often been shown.

Among civilized peoples, especially the...

Among civilized peoples, especially the very wealthy population of the United States of America, women have become objects of luxury who consume but do not produce.

Ambition is the grand enemy...

Ambition is the grand enemy of all peace.

Law could never, by determining...

Law could never, by determining exactly what is noblest and must just for one and all, enjoin upon them that which is best; for the differences of men and of actions and the fact that nothing, I may say, in human life is ever at rest, forbid any science whatsoever to promulgate any simple rule for everything and for all time… So, that which is persistently simple is inapplicable to things which are never simple.

Only the idiot is equipped...

Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.

And because the condition of...

And because the condition of Man, (as hath been declared in the precedent Chapter) is a condition of Warre of every one against everyone; in which case every one is governed by his own Reason; and there is nothing he can make use of, that may not be a help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemyes; It followeth, that in such a condition, every man has a Right to every thing; even to one anothers body.

Men do reverence men. Men...

Men do reverence men. Men do worship in that 'one temple of the world,' as Novalis calls it, the Presence of a Man! Hero-worship, true and blessed, or else mistaken, false and accursed, goes on everywhere and everywhen. In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that was or ever will be of godlike in this world: the veneration done to Human Worth by the hearts of men. Hero-worship, in the souls of the heroic, of the clear and wise,—it is the perpetual presence of Heaven in our poor Earth: when it is not there, Heaven is veiled from us; and all is under Heaven's ban and interdict, and there is no worship, or worthship, or worth or blessedness in the Earth any more!—

Men have made an idol...

Men have made an idol of luck as an excuse for their own thoughtlessness. Luck seldom measures swords with wisdom. Most things in life quick wit and sharp vision can set right.

The historical materialist leaves it...

The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called "Once upon a time" in historicism's bordello.

The mind of man may...

The mind of man may be compared to a musical instrument with a certain range of notes, beyond which in both directions we have an infinitude of silence.

Socrates:...Can you point out any...

Socrates:...Can you point out any compelling rhetorical reason why he should have put his arguments together in the order that he has? Phaedrus: You do me too much honour if you suppose that I am capable of divining his motives so exactly.

It seems not absurd to...

It seems not absurd to conceive, that at first production of mixt bodies, the universal matter, whereof they among other parts of the universe consisted, was actually divided, into little particles, of several sizes and shapes, variously moved.

No one can enjoy freedom...

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

For it is not the...

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.

He thinks that Hero-worship, done...

He thinks that Hero-worship, done differently in every different epoch of the world, is the soul of all social business among men; that the doing of it well, or the doing of it ill, measures accurately what degree of well-being or of ill- being there is in the world's affairs. He thinks that we, on the whole, do our Hero-worship worse than any Nation in this world ever did it before: that the Burns an Exciseman, the Byron a Literary Lion, are intrinsically, all things considered, a baser and falser phenomenon than the Odin a God, the Mahomet a Prophet of God. It is this Editor's clear opinion, accordingly, that we must learn to do our Hero-worship better; that to do it better and better, means the awakening of the Nation's soul from its asphyxia, and the return of blessed life to us,—Heaven's blessed life, not Mammon's galvanic accursed one. To resuscitate the Asphyxied, apparently now moribund, and in the last agony if not resuscitated: such and no other seems the consummation. 'Hero-worship,' if you will,—yes, friends; but, first of all, by being ourselves of heroic mind.

From a young age, I've...

From a young age, I've viewed the animals we abuse and kill as akin - functionally, intellectually and emotionally - to small children. Small children are vulnerable. Typically, they don't need "liberating". Infants and toddlers in particular need looking after. The problem - when I was a teenager - was that most of interventions I could think of to alleviate wild animal suffering might easily make things worse in the long run. Thus if we sought to rescue herbivores, then obligate carnivores (and their young) would starve. If we were to phase out carnivorous predators altogether, then there would a population explosion of "prey" species. Lots of herbivores would then starve too. The food chain seemed an inexorable fact of the world - a fact as immutable as, say, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Only after reading Eric Drexler's classic "Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology" did I gradually come to realize that there were technical solutions to all these problems - notably in vitro meat, immunocontraception, neurochips to modulate behaviour, nanobots to manage marine ecosystems, and ultimately rewriting the vertebrate genome.