Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about.
What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.
None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much.
The tears of anguish irritate and excite; but those of repentance are the ones that wash.
The chiefest sanctity of a temple is that it is a place to which men go to weep in common.
Man habitually sacrifices his life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity.
Use harms and even destroys beauty. The noblest function of an object is to be contemplated.
These terrible sociologists, who are the astrologers and alchemists of our twentieth century.
Science robs men of wisdom and usually converts them into phantom beings loaded up with facts.
Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea.
Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.
To believe in God is to yearn for His existence and, furthermore, it is to act as if He did exist.
It is not the shilling I give you that counts, but the warmth that it carries with it from my hand.
I would say that teleology is theology, and that God is not a "because," but rather an "in order to.
And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.
Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.
While men believe themselves to be seeking truth for its own sake, they are in fact seeking life in truth.
Philosophy fulfills the need to create for ourselves a single and complete concept of the world and of life.
Suffering is the substance of life and the root of personality, for it is only suffering that makes us persons.
Everything that exalts and expands consciousness is good, while that which depresses and diminishes it is evil.
The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule.
There are people who are so full of common sense that they haven't the slightest cranny left for their own sense.
Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.
Man is perishing. That may be, and if it is nothingness that awaits us let us so act that it will be an unjust fate.
My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live.
What is certain is that for thinking believers to-day, faith is, before all and above all, wishing that God may exist.
Piensa el sentimiento, siente el pensamiento." (roughly translated, "Think about the emotional and feel the intellectual")
If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it, let us fight against destiny, even without hope of victory.
Every peasant has a lawyer inside of him, just as every lawyer, no matter how urbane he may be, carries a peasant within himself.
If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man.
Cure yourself of the inclination to bother about how you look to other people. Be concerned only . . . with the idea God has of you.
If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory.
Science is the most intimate school of resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly most insignificant of facts.
We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the universe.
All knowledge has an ultimate goal. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but a dismal begging of the question.
The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.
Scholasticism, a concept which does not bear criticism, is a theological concept specifically designed to sustain faith in the immortality of the soul.
It is not usually our ideas that make us optimistic or pessimistic, but it is our optimism or pessimism of physiological or pathological origin that makes our ideas.
Cure yourself of the affliction of caring how you appear to others. Concern yourself only with how you appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have of you.
The moment love is equated with happiness, it is satisfied — and is no longer love. The satisfied, the happy ones, do not love; they fall asleep in habit, near neighbor to annihilation.
We men do nothing but lie and make ourselves important. Speech was invented for the purpose of magnifying all of our sensations and impressions — perhaps so that we could believe in them.
Hell has been conceived as a police institution, to inspire fear in this world. But the worst of it all is that it no longer frightens anyone, and therefore it will have to be closed down.
Science teaches us, in effect, to submit our reason to the truth and to know and judge of things as they are-that is to say, as they themselves choose to be and not as we would have them to be.
And usually [the philosopher] philosophizes either in order to resign himself to life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget his griefs, or for pastime and amusement.
My work...is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention from faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself.
My religion is searching for the truth in life and life in the truth, though knowing that I do not have to find it while I live; my religion is fighting incessantly and tirelessly with the unknown.
Is there anything more terrible than a "call"? It affords an occasion for the exchange of the most threadbare commonplaces. Calls and the theatre are the two great centers for the propagation of platitudes.
The will, the will not ever to die, the refusal to resign oneself to death, ceaselessly builds the house of life while the keen blasts and icy winds of reason unceasingly batter at the structure and beat it down.
Science says: 'We must live,' and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable, wisdom says: 'We must die,' and seeks how to make us die well.
At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right