Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The bad gives rise to the good, the good inspires the better, the better produces the excellent, the excellent is followed by the bizarre
It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.
Has creation a final purpose at all, and if so why is it not attained immediately, why does perfection not exist from the very beginning?
Happy is the man who knows or even the man who remembers those silent vigils where silence itself was the sign of the communion of souls!
A mind at liberty to reflect on its own observations, if it produce nothing useful to the world, seldom fails of entertainment to itself.
Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretence to it; but the free-thinker alone is truly free.
It is unhappily true that much insincere Literature and Art, executed solely with a view to effect, does succeed by deceiving the public.
Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
What you receive from others is a testimony to their virtue; but all that you do for others is the sign and clear indication of your own.
Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit. If they be vegetative, he will be like a plant.
The Way of an enlightened ruler is to make it so that no minister may make a proposal and then fail to match it with actions and results.
Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
We do violence to the consciousness of a past age when we divide what was indivisible to it: the one sacred truth of the Christian creed.
Men don't achieve truth because they lack humility and love of truth. They won't criticize their own beliefs. Truth would overwhelm them.
Faith is certitude without proofs ... Faith is a sentiment, for it is a hope; it is an instinct, for it precedes all outward instruction.
A blow to the head will confuse a man's thinking, a blow to the foot has no such effect, this cannot be the result of an immaterial soul.
Love is life's end, but never ending. Love is life's wealth, never spent, but ever spending. Love's life's reward, rewarded in rewarding.
So long as selfishness makes government needful at all, it must make every government corrupt, save one in which all men are represented.
I am in love with no other than myself, and my very separation is my union... I am my beloved and my lover; I am my knight and my maiden.
Even a man's exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale.
[A ruler is merely] the trustee of the rights of other men and he must always stand in dread of having in some way violated these rights.
The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend — and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him.
Belief is reassuring. People who live in the world of belief feel safe. On the contrary, faith is forever placing us on the razor's edge.
Self-love is an instrument useful but dangerous; it often wounds the hand which makes use of it, and seldom does good without doing harm.
Whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free.
Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. It is strange that these voices often contradict each other?
I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.
The conception of education as a social process and function has no definite meaning until we define the kind of society we have in mind.
The difference, so observable in men's understandings and parts, does not arise so much from their natural faculties, as acquired habits.
Children generally hate to be idle; all the care then is that their busy humour should be constantly employed in something of use to them
It is not the mediocrity of women's education which makes their weakness; it is their weakness which necessarily causes their mediocrity.
I think I never expected "Gender trouble" to have any particularly revolutionary effect so whatever effects it has, I'm always surprised.
Science and democracy are the right and left hands of what I'll refer to as the move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.
Nothing has changed in Russias policy. Her methods, her tactics, her maneuvers may change, but the pole starworld dominationis immutable.
The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.
A good manager is best when people barely know that he exists. Not so good when people obey and acclaim him. Worse when they despise him.
There is no calamity greater than lavish desires. There is no greater guilt than discontent. And there is no greater disaster than greed.
By steadily disciplining the animal nature, until it becomes one pointed, it is possible to establish conscious awareness of The Eternal.
A citizen who casts his ballot without having to the best of his abilities studied as much economics as he can fails in his civic duties.
Men are fighting... because they are convinced that the extermination of adversaries is the only means of promoting their own well-being.
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.
Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved... it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.
If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.
For what is there more hideous than avarice, more brutal than lust, more contemptible than cowardice, more base than stupidity and folly?
In our amusements a certain limit is to be placed that we may not devote ourselves to a life of pleasure and thence fall into immorality.
Nulla (enim) res tantum ad dicendum proficit, quantum scriptio Nothing so much assists learning as writing down what we wish to remember.
There is a continuum between science and philosophy. As Fichte said (but did not practice), philosophy should be the science of sciences.
The ideas of things intellectually known pass into the substance of the intellect much more than do foods into the substance of the body.