Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nothing ever happens but once in all this world. What I do now I do once for all. It is over and gone, with all its eternity of solemn meaning.
It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.
Are not our greatest men as good as lost? The men that walk daily among us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness, mere mythic men.
War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.
Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it.
Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.
In the beginning the gods did not at all reveal all things clearly to mortals, but by searching men in the course of time find them out better.
I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is ... for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.
A proponent of the big bang theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the matter of the universe came from nothing and by nothing.
No democracy can exist unless each of its citizens is as capable of outrage at injustice to another as he is of outrage at unjustice to himself.
He is his own best friend and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy and is afraid of solitude.
Leisure of itself gives pleasure and happiness and enjoyment of life, which are experienced, not by the busy man, but by those who have leisure.
Marriage is like retiring as a bachelor and getting a sexual pension. You don't have to work for the sex any more, but you only get 65% as much.
No one praises happiness as one praises justice, but we call it a 'blessing,' deeming it something higher and more divine than things we praise.
Metaphysics involves intuitive knowledge of unprovable starting-points concepts and truth and demonstrative knowledge of what follows from them.
To know what virtue is is not enough; we must endeavor to possess and to practice it, or in some other manner actually ourselves to become good.
People of superior refinement and of active disposition identify happiness with honour; for this is roughly speaking, the end of political life.
Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is an abstract satisfaction of all.
Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.
I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.
I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.
The first effect of emancipation from the Church was not to make men think rationally, but to open their minds to every sort of antique nonsense
I went to Salt Lake City and the Mormons tried to convert me, but when I found they forbade tea and tobacco I thought it was no religion for me.
To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club to survive when all of its members are dead.
When one cultivates to the utmost the principles of his nature, and exercises them on the principle of reciprocity, he is not far from the path.
The wise man admires water, the kind man admires mountains. The wise man moves, the kind man rests. The wise man is happy, the kind man is firm.
To be excellent when engaged in administration is to be like the North Star. As it remains in its one position, all the other stars surround it.
Part of the problem is we had so far to go, given the deep homophobia in our society. But, the movement is very real. The movement is very real.
Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them - if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.
To have recourse to the veracity of the supreme Being, in order to prove the veracity of our senses, is surely making a very unexpected circuit.
Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within.
A passionate obsession with the outside world or the private lives of others is an attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own life
The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.
The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate.
Absolute power turns its possessors not into a God but an anti-God. For God turned clay into men, while the absolute despot turns men into clay.
A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.
We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.
Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular deity.
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
If you see a philosopher determining all things by means of right reason, him you shall reverence: he is a heavenly being and not of this earth.
If a ruler can get rid of private crookedness and promote the public law, his people will become secure, and his state will become well ordered.
If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.
Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me.
Every situation is an equilibrium of forces; every life is a struggle between opposing forces working within the limits of a certain equilibrium
A rich man cannot enjoy a sound mind nor a sound body without exercise and abstinence; and yet these are truly the worst ingredients of poverty.
Sins are like chains and locks preventing their perpetrator from roaming the vast garden of Tawheed and reaping the fruits of righteous actions.
The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.
So persuasive is the power of the institutions we have created that they shape not only our preferences but actually our sense of possibilities.