Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Lastly, literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist.
There is no more irritating fellow than the man who tries to settle an argument about communism, or justice, or liberty, by quoting from Webster.
In idling, the motor's running, but you're letting your mind take in anything. Things pop into it. Those are the gifts of subterranean conscious.
In fact man's career has been less like a mountain torrent hurtling from rock to rock, than a great sluggish river, broken very seldom by rapids.
Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.
The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.
If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.
It is pure illusion to think that an opinion which passes down from century to century, from generation to generation, may not be entirely false.
Avoid compulsion and let early education be a matter of amusement. Young children learn by games; compulsory education cannot remain in the soul.
It would be better for me ... that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.
Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sun-like, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.
The conclusion, so vexatious to democracy, that wisdom and not popularity qualifies for rule may be forced upon us by the peril in atomic energy.
At every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different
Buildings like Penn Station attract our protective instincts not only because of their beauty but because we fear what will come to replace them.
The Marxist theory of ideology is extremely contentious, not least because it is tied to socio-economic hypotheses that are no longer believable.
One must take all one's life to learn how to leave, and what will perhaps make you wonder more, one must take all one's life to learn how to die.
It is another's fault if he be ungrateful, but it is mine if I do not give. To find one thankful man, I will oblige a great many that are not so.
When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.
All the Freudian system is impregnated with the prejudice which it makes it its mission to fight -- the prejudice that everything sexual is vile.
The end of life is to be like unto God; and the soul following God, will be like unto Him; He being the beginning, middle, and end of all things.
The soul is cured of its maladies by certain incantations; these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls.
Not by wisdom do they [poets] make what they compose, but by a gift of nature and an inspiration similar to that of the diviners and the oracles.
If I can assign names as well as pictures to objects, the right assignment of them we may call truth, and the wrong assignment of them falsehood.
No time of life is so beautiful as the early days of love, when with every meeting, every glance, one fetches something new home to rejoice over.
To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.
The most common despair is...not choosing, or willing, to be oneself...[but] the deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than oneself.
We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event.
The problem is we have to transcend cultural languages and fall into a phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us.
There is no hierarchy of elder knowledge in my social region of things. There are only people learning and sharing in a very complex environment.
Terror itself, when once grown transcendental, becomes a kind of courage; as frost sufficiently intense, according to the poet Milton, will burn.
The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present. Gluttony is a lust of the mind.
I'm not a militant atheist, just an atheist. In fact, in a largely atheist country like the UK I think it's a bit silly to be a militant atheist.
Philosophy means liberation from the - routine, soaring above the well known, seeing it in new perspectives, arousing wonder and the wish to fly.
Government, religion, property, books, are nothing but the scaffolding to build men. Earth holds up to her master no fruit like the finished man.
I take it, therefore, to be a fact, that one's existence ends with death. I think it possible to show how this fact can be emotionally acceptable.
The highest measure of democracy is neither the 'extent of freedom' nor the 'extent of equality', but rather the highest measure of participation.
We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.
Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
The objective level is not words, and cannot be reached by words alone. We must point our finger and be silent, or we will never reach this level.
I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can, in turn, be a blessing to society.
Shakespeare did not consider himself the legislator of mankind. He faithfully records man's problems and does not evidently propose to solve them.
The evidence for the resurrection is better than for claimed miracles in any other religion. It's outstandingly different in quality and quantity.
[this element], the seat of the appetites and of desire in general, does in a sense participate in principle, as being amenable and obedient to it
A man who examines each subject from a philosophical standpoint cannot neglect them: he has to omit nothing, and state the truth about each topic.
What is common to many is least taken care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than what they possess in common with others.
Happiness does not lie in amusement; it would be strange if one were to take trouble and suffer hardship all one's life in order to amuse oneself.
These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions ... The good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life.
Pride works _from within_; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.
In mathematics we find the primitive source of rationality; and to mathematics must the biologists resort for means to carry out their researches.
We can always get along better by reason and love of truth than by worry of conscience and remorse...we should strive to keep worry from our life.