Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal.
...The body is affected by the image of the thing, in the same way as if the thing were actually present.
A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.
Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.
The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.
The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernel of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education.
Human nature is so constructed that it gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it.
When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.
There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways.
All the time that he can spare from the adornment of his person, he devotes to the neglect of his duties.
Real life is, to most men, a long second best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
I am allowed to use plain English because everybody knows that I could use mathematical logic if I chose.
One of the chief triumphs of modern mathematics consists in having discovered what mathematics really is.
Right conduct can never, except by some rare accident, be promoted by ignorance or hindered by knowledge.
Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.
One could judge the degree of civilization of a country by the social and political position of its women
Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.
As the water shapes itself to the vessel that contains it, so a wise man adapts himself to circumstances.
The superior man does what is proper to the station in which he is; he does not desire to go beyond this.
Without an acquaintance with the rules of propriety, it is impossible for the character to be established
You can successfully force people to follow a certain course, but you cannot force them to understand it.
The superior man is universally minded and no partisan. The inferior man is a partisan and not universal.
Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.
"Spirituality" wrongly understood or pursued is a major source of human misery and rebellion against God.
Money was invented as a lubricant for the barter system, but we're way overdue for a lube and oil change.
We have to cross the boundary between knowing and not knowing many times before we achieve understanding.
It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.
The whole Earth is at the hand of the wise man, since the fatherland of an elevated soul is the Universe.
We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
You can be sure that a painter reveals himself in his work as much as and more than a writer does in his.
A thing is not proved because no one has ever questioned it... Skepticism is the first step toward truth.
Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves. Whistle and dance the shimmy, and you've got an audience.
To become self-educated you should condemn yourself for all those things that you would criticize others.
Euripides says,-Who knows but that this life is really death,And whether death is not what men call life?
The certainty of death and the uncertainty of the hour of death is a source of grief throughout our life.
How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.
We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.
Action can give us the feeling of being useful, but only words can give us a sense of weight and purpose.
The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.
The cost of a thing is what I call life which has to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream.
No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.
The heart is everywhere, and each part of the organism is only the specialized force of the heart itself.
Sincerity is not only effective and honourable, it is also much less difficult than is commonly supposed.
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin... to set something into motion.
In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.