Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge.
A pygmy standing on the outward crust of this small planet, his far-reaching spirit stretches outward to the infinite, and there alone finds rest.
When two, or more men, know of one and the same fact, they are said to be CONSCIOUS of it one to another; which is as much as to know it together.
A Covenant not to defend myself from force, by force, is always void. For... no man can transfer or lay down his Right to save himself from Death.
The inferior man attempts a hundred intrigues in order to save himself, but finishes only in creating a greater calamity from which he cannot run.
Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.
True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.
The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgment passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.
You cannot speak of ocean to a well-frog, the creature of a narrower sphere. You cannot speak of ice to a summer insect, the creature of a season.
Men do not mirror themselves in running water - they mirror themselves in still water. Only what is still can still the stillness of other things.
Observe people with cool eyes, listen to their words with cool ears. Confront feelings with cool emotions, reflect on principles with a cool mind.
The price of training is always a certain trained incapacity: the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently.
In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure.
Don't hurry anything. Don't worry about the future. Don't worry about what progress you're making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is.
Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.
Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?
The truly good and wise man will bear all kinds of fortune in a seemly way, and will always act in the noblest manner that the circumstances allow.
Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
Perhaps here we have a clue to the reason why royal rule used to exist formerly, namely the difficulty of finding enough men of outstanding virtue.
Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. The tragic plot must not be composed of irrational parts.
Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation.
We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.
When we have told how things behave when they are electrified, and under what circumstances they are electrified, we have told all there is to know
It is permissible with certain precautions to speak in print of coitus, but it is not permissible to employ the monosyllabic synonym for this word.
Envy ... is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves but only in their relations.
When a nation or family is about to flourish, there are sure to be happy omens; and when it is about to perish, there are sure to be unlucky omens.
Belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain.
At an early age I sucked up the milk of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Anacreon, Plato and Euripides, diluted with that of Moses and the prophets.
A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.
The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.
With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.
When you dream, your perceptual (and other) competence is affected. You are then unable to get it right competently with the beliefs in your dream.
The nature of finite things is to have the seed of their passing-away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.
No deeply rooted tendency was ever extirpated by adverse judgment. Not having originally been founded on argument, it cannot be destroyed by logic.
It is not enough that a man has clearness of vision, and reliance on sincerity, he must also have the art of expression, or he will remain obscure.
Only the person who does not evade conflict and directs his efforts in keeping with the course of society's development can be an effective leader.
Only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevation the State to the level of de jure universality
One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
The way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing; if anything is dead, it can only be the traditional thought of God.
Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense, and is lending oneself to the universal illusion without becoming its dupe.
The spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the control.
No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.
The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience
If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction.
When we judge, we are pushing people away; we are creating a wall, a barrier. When we forgive we are destroying barriers, we come closer to others.
When children are loved, they live off trust; their bides and hearts open up to those who respect and love them, who understand and listen to them.
It's just what people do when they're getting old, when they're sick of themselves and their life; they think of money and take care of themselves.
To love is never just to love since it is also to will to love, and ... to love in spite of oneself, to allow oneself to be overcome by one's love.
The ultimate aim of production is not production of goods but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality.
What's in a question, you ask? Everything. It is evoking stimulating response or stultifying inquiry. It is, in essence, the very core of teaching.