Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The fall or scrapping of a cultural world puts us all into the same archetypal cesspool, engendering nostalgia for earlier conditions.
God is the "mysterium tremendum," that appears and overthrows, but he is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.
Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful... but also when it comes to happiness.
Love God, and do as you like, say the Free Spirits. Yes; but as long as you like anything contrary to God's will, you do not love Him.
Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence
The Lord God, the creator of Judaism and the God of Judaism and Christianity, empowered our minds and gave us the ability to question.
We must escape and help others to escape the two readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers' fusion of identities.
If you are clever enough to figure out what men want, you are either too wise to marry them or too intimidating for them to marry you.
Effective altruism is the form of altruism in which we bring our rational capacities to bear in order to do the most good that we can.
Riches should be admitted into our houses, but not into our hearts; we may take them into our possession, but not into our affections.
Let him know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible. . . . For this is the way of happiness.
The truth is that we isolate a particular kind of love and appropriate it for the name of love, which really belongs to a wider whole.
It is requisite to defend those who are unjustly accused of having acted injuriously, but to praise those who excel in a certain good.
Every man is indeed bound to do what he can to promote the good of others, and a man who is of no use to anyone is strictly worthless.
The traditional family has an intrinsic as well as an instrumental value, and that is the real reason so many conservatives defend it.
In the Imperialist Era, the foreign loan played an outstanding part as a means for young capitalist countries to acquire independence.
Conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor.
Dead, we become the lumber of the world, And to that mass of matter shall be swept Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept.
Those vices [luxury and neglect of decent manners] are vices of men, not of the times. [Lat., Hominum sunt ista [vitia], non temporum.
While the fates permit, live happily; life speeds on with hurried step, and with winged days the wheel of the headlong year is turned.
Every atheist is an idolater- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.
Some have courage in pleasures, and some in pains: some in desires, and some in fears, and some are cowards under the same conditions.
I found I had less and less to say, until finally, I became silent, and began to listen. I discovered in the silence, the voice of God
The more men believe an idea to be true the greater the likelihood that the idea is mistaken. Those who are right usually stand alone.
We cannot afford to raise any institution to the rank of a fetish. To do so would be simply to become the slaves of our own machinery.
You are not the mind. If you know you are not the mind, then what difference does it make if it's busy or quiet? You are not the mind.
All that a guru can tell you is: 'My dear Sir, you are quite mistaken about yourself. You are not the person you take yourself to be.'
I don't believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.
Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we're working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of.
Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.
The state in the matter of drugs should not, any more than in the matter of sex, act as the secret agent for the agenda of the church.
Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.
Subjectivity is an ability, the capacity to use a new inner mode of presenting the fact that you currently know something to yourself.
Man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.
Are we not wasps who spend all day in a fruitless attempt to traverse a window-pane - while the other half of the window is wide open?
The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.
We have a strange anxiety in us; that if we don't interfere then it won't happen. Now that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble.
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
It is better to fall in with crows than with flatterers; for in the one case you are devoured when dead, in the other case while alive.
The Koran calls for belief and consequent obedience. It is, surely, calculated to inspire fear, indeed abject terror, rather than love.
To die in order to avoid the pains of poverty, love, or anything that is disagreeable, is not the part of a brave man, but of a coward.
Music directly represents the passions of the soul. If one listens to the wrong kind of music, he will become the wrong kind of person.
Yes the truth is that men's ambition and their desire to make money are among the most frequent causes of deliberate acts of injustice.
The many are more incorruptible than the few; they are like the greater quantity of water which is less easily corrupted than a little.
A state of the soul is either (1) an emotion, (2) a capacity, or (3) a disposition; virtue therefore must be one of these three things.
If then it be possible that one contrary should exist, or be called into existence, the other contrary will also appear to be possible.
When the citizens at large administer the state for the common interest, the government is called by the generic name - a constitution.
Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?
Statesman are suspected of plotting against mankind, rather than consulting their interests, and are esteemed more crafty than learned.
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.