Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist.
It is bad to want something that not even God could attain, especially when the impossibility becomes obvious.
The State becomes society or humanity on the ethical side, a production and trade system on the economic side.
The first internal relation that is essential to a secret society is the reciprocal confidence of its members.
So long as I confine my thoughts to my own ideas divested of words, I do not see how I can be easily mistaken.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility.
For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
Love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.
The emotion felt by a man in the presence of nature certainly counts for something in the origin of religions.
Luxury possibly may contribute to give bread to the poor; but if there were no luxury, there would be no poor.
What sense or thought do they have? They follow the popular singers, and they take the crowd as their teacher.
To God everything is beautiful, good, and just; humans, however, think some things are unjust and others just.
One must know that war is common, justice is strife, and everything happens according to strife and necessity.
Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life.
Pervading all nature we may see at work a stern discipline , which is a little cruel that it may be very kind.
I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - you write backward Es!
All peoples have evolved extraordinarily precise ways of settling issues about the things that matter to them.
Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.
Innocence is indeed a glorious thing; but, unfortunately, it does not keep very well and is easily led astray.
When a man speaks of the need for realism one may be sure that this is always the prelude to some bloody deed.
Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.
It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.
The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.
Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.
You see, the contemporary writer must write through his intimations of unease, while trying to elucidate them.
One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.
What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.
The development occurs through reciprocal give-and-take, the teacher taking but not being afraid also to give.
We have lost confidence in reason because we have learned that man is chiefly a creature of habit and emotion.
All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it.
Mathematical proofs, like diamonds, are hard and clear, and will be touched with nothing but strict reasoning.
The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.
The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.
It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.
The philosophy of reasoning, to be complete, ought to comprise the theory of bad as well as of good reasoning.
So natural to mankind is intolerance ... that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realized.
I don't think it could be a coincidence that the more technological a society is, the less it connects people.
Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.
Human vitality is so exuberant that in the sorriest desert it still finds a pretext for glowing and trembling.
The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-satisfied man."
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
Fame of self: Which matters more? Self or wealth: Which is more precious? Gain or loss: Which is more painful?
The slaying of multitudes should be mourned with sorrow. A victory should be celebrated with the funeral rite.
If the highest things are unknowable, then the highest capacity or virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom.
To send a child to rot in the prison of Cuba for the alleged sake of his own well-being is criminal hypocrisy.
In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.
In the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature.
Nothing, however, is as ill founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race.