Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I consider the indiscriminate propagation of self-help to be morally unacceptable... self-help is the opposite of autonomous or vernacular life.
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.
It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us unintelligibly, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.
You see, I'm fond of teasing, it's a second nature with me—and I'm used to teasing myself. Plaguing myself, if you prefer; I don't tease nicely.
The data that can bear on the confirmation of perceptual hypotheses includes, in the general case, considerably less than the organism may know.
Experience alone cannot deliver to us necessary truths; truths completely demonstrated by reason. Its conclusions are particular, not universal.
One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.
The intolerant can be viewed as free-riders, as persons who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing their share to uphold them.
Whatever helps to shape the human being - to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not - is part of his education.
There is no man who desires as passionately as a Russian. If we could imprison a Russian desire beneath a fortress, that fortress would explode.
All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.
Being satisfied with little, you can gain much. Seeking much you will go astray. The wise heeds this precept. If it could be so with all people!
Know the white, But keep the black, Be an example to the world! Being an example to the world, Ever true and unwavering, Return to the infinite.
letting be is as important as mastering. Our tradition has encouraged us to be effective, to make or fabricate but not to let be born or let be.
What is a loophole? If the law does not punish a definite action or does not tax a definite thing, this is not a loophole. It is simply the law.
If, as is generally the case, the heirs are not equal to the demands which life makes on an entrepreneur, the inherited wealth rapidly vanishes.
In the beginning we must simplify the subject, thus unavoidably falsifying it, and later we must sophisticate away the falsely simple beginning.
Who doesn't know that the first law of history is not to dare to say anything false, and the second is not to refrain from saying anything true?
The suddenness of the leap from hardware to software cannot but produce a period of anarchy and collapse, especially in the developed countries.
The public has yet to see TV as TV. Broadcasters have no awareness of its potential. The movie people are just beginning to get a grasp on film.
The true meaning of love one's neighbor is not that it is a command from God which we are to fulfill, but that through it and in it we meet God.
If I say that God is good, that is not true. God is not good. I am good, and if I say that God is wise, that is not true. I am wiser than he is.
The Ultimate and Highest leave taking is leaving God for GOD, leaving your notion of God for an Experience of That which transcends all notions.
There are some religious traditions that view human beings as participants in creation. This is true of the Jewish tradition, from which I come.
The Russian yearning for the meaning of life is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our intelligentsia's existence.
The key to wisdom is this - constant and frequent questioning, for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.
The air is full of souls those who are nearest to earth descending to be tied to mortal bodies return to other bodies, desiring to live in them.
It is pure illusion to think that an opinion that passes down from century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false.
We had thought that we were human beings making a spiritual journey; it may be truer to say that we are spiritual beings making a human journey.
The awful wrongs and sufferings forced upon the innocent, helpless, faithful animal race form the blackest chapter in the whole world's history.
One way ... in which a political philosophy can be ideological is by presenting a relatively marginal issue as if it were central and essential.
Piety is a discipline of the will through respect. It admits the right to exist of things larger than the ego, of things different from the ego.
It is commonly believed that anyone who tabulates numbers is a statistician. This is like believing that anyone who owns a scalpel is a surgeon.
For many artists and critics, beauty is a discredited idea. It denotes the saccharine sylvan scenes and cheesy melodies that appealed to Granny.
Nothing upset me more than the award of Companion of Honour to Eric Hobsbawm in reward for a lifetime of unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union.
All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
Capitalism, as a result of its own inner contradictions, moves toward a point when it will be unbalanced, when it will simply become impossible.
It is to the interest of the commonwealth of mankind that there should be someone who is unconquered, someone against whom fortune has no power.
As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures.
Some level of truthfulness has always been seen as essential to human society, no matter how deficient the observance of other moral principles.
Probably never in human history did we live in a society in which, at the microlevel of personal behavior, our lives were so strongly regulated.
I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.
The uninitiated are those who believe in nothing except what they can grasp in their hands, and who deny the existence of all that is invisible.
Christians remind me of schoolboys who want to look up the answers to their math problems in the back of the book rather than work them through.
When all combine in every way to make everything easier, people will want difficulty. I conceived it as my task to make difficulties everywhere.
There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules
It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable.