Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Each human being is bred with a unique set of potentials that yearn to be fulfilled as surely as the acorn yearns to become the oak within it.
Excellence or virtue in a man will be the disposition which renders him a good man and also which will cause him to perform his function well.
Such an event is probable in Agathon's sense of the word: 'it is probable,' he says, 'that many things should happen contrary to probability.'
Now all orators effect their demonstrative proofs by allegation either of enthymems or examples, and, besides these, in no other way whatever.
If then nature makes nothing without some end in view, nothing to no purpose, it must be that nature has made all of them for the sake of man.
To expect a man to retain everything that he has ever read is like expecting him to carry about in his body everything that he has ever eaten.
Every human perfection is allied to a defect into which it threatens to pass, but it is also true that every defect is allied to a perfection.
The conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another.
That the world is in a bad shape is undeniable, but there is not the faintest reason in history to suppose that Christianity offers a way out.
The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe.
Science has made unrestricted national sovereignty incompatible with human survival. The only possibilities are now world government or death.
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is a paradox; as is a paradox why the number 1 is not prime if it has no other divisors besides himself.
The atomists , unlike Socrates , Plato , and Aristotle , sought to explain the world without introducing the notion of purpose or final cause.
There is a certain head, and that head you have not. Now this being so, there is a head which you have not; therefore, you are without a head.
If you yourself desire establishment, then help others to get establishment; if you yourself want success, then help others to attain success.
The shortest distance between any two points on a golf course is a straight line that passes directly through the center of a very large tree.
If language is not rectified, words do not correspond to meaning, and if words do not correspond to meaning, our deeds cannot be accomplished.
The aim is not for me to be right. The aim is to make sure that we keep the focus on the people who are suffering. That's what we're here for.
what I think separates me from most philosophers probably is that I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind, I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas.
The consequence of a very free commerce between the sexes, and of their living much together, will often terminate in intrigues and gallantry.
Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.
Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.
If a misplaced admiration shows imbecility, an affected criticism shows vice of character. Expose thyself rather to appear a beast than false.
I had given up practising my Jewish religion when I was a 14-year-old girl and did not begin to feel Jewish again until I had returned to God.
people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.
There is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European war'... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word.
In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced.
Secrecy sets barriers between men, but at the same time offers the seductive temptation to break through the barriers by gossip or confession.
To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation.
The self has the characteristic that it is an object to itself, and that characteristic distinguishes it from other objects and from the body.
The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
God is the universal substance in existing things. He comprises all things. He is the fountain of all being. In Him exists everything that is.
Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.
Man's duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself.
Arrogance is, as it were, a solicitation on the part of one seeking honor for followers, whom he thinks he is entitled to treat with contempt.
Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.
Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'
School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.
The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.
Religion is the belief in an ever-living God, that is, in a Divine Mind and Will ruling the Universe and holding moral relations with mankind.
I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature.
Luxury either comes of riches or makes them necessary; it corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.
The science of government is only a science of combinations, of applications, and of exceptions, according to times, places and circumstances.
[Andre] Gide can say it to me: it is a writer's morality only addressed to a few privileged people. For that reason it no longer interests me.
There is no discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and direction.
Since the great foundation of fear is pain, the way to harden and fortify children against fear and danger is to accustom them to suffer pain.
And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself to be on firm ground.
Man must not only make himself: the weightiest thing he has to do is to determine what he is going to be. He is causa sui to the second power.
To celebrate a festival means: to live out, for some special occasion and in an uncommon manner, the universal assent to the world as a whole.