Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is
If you believe in evolution and naturalism then you have a reason not to think your faculties are reliable.
We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace.
Personal beauty requires that one should be tall; little people may have charm and elegance, but beauty-no.
Where perception is, there also are pain and pleasure, and where these are, there, of necessity, is desire.
Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack. Therefore, rather than grateful, we are bitter.
Man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so.
Religion may in most of its forms be defined as the belief that the gods are on the side of the government.
While economics is about how people make choice, sociology is about how they don't have any choice to make.
I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.
Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.
The sea, the stars, the night wind in waste places, mean more to me than even the human beings I love best.
Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit; divorced from it, they remain barren.
In all the creative work that I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort.
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.
In every kind of adversity, the bitterest part of a man's affliction is to remember that he once was happy.
Shakespeare without Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet would be all too much like Hamlet without the prince.
Because of our Congressional committee system, our government is closer to a gerontocracy than a democracy.
It is impossible not to envy the man who can dismiss reason, although we know how it must turn out at last.
Fix your mind on truth, hold firm to virtue, rely on loving kindness, and find your recreation in the Arts.
Wisdom, humanity & courage, these three are universal virtues. The way by which they are practiced are one.
Make faithfulness and truth thy masters: have no friends unlike thyself: be not ashamed to mend thy faults.
A blemish may be removed from a diamond by careful polishing, but evil words once spoken cannot be effaced.
It is the obligation of the ruler to continually renew himself in order to renew the people by his example.
There is good government when those who are near are made happy, and when those who are afar are attracted.
Fantasies are real. They have effects on your soul, even though, as I was too young to really step forward.
The effect of standing before God by welcoming him before us will be the transformation of our entire life.
The spirit is the part that is supposed to consciously direct everything in the person, including the soul.
The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.
Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high.
Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit.
To the creative individual all experience is seminal-all events are equidistant from new ideasand insights.
Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Only the individual who has come to terms with his self can have a dispassionate attitude toward the world.
The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.
Ultimately, my more significant agreement is with a virtue tradition that features Aristotle and Descartes.
Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.
Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.
Where the people are well educated, the art of piloting a state is best learned from the writings of Plato.
In wartime we identify ourselves with the nation, and its interests are the interests of our primal selves.
The superiority of one mind over another depends on the rapidity with which experiences are thus organised.
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else
There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.
Unconsciousness, spontaneity, instinct ... hold us to the earth and dictate the relatively good and useful.
One has to kill a few of one’s natural selves to let the rest grow — a very painful slaughter of innocents.
I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets