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Quotes by Philosopher
"Respect life, revere life. There is nothing more holy than life itself."
65
"Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed."
65
"Courage treats the weak better than fear treats the strong."
64
"If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe."
God,
64
"Man does not strive for happiness, only the Englishman does that."
64
"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."
64
"Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains."
63
"Dance like no one is watching, love like you have never been hurt."
63
"God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures."
63
"Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind."
63
"Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it."
62
"A man can only attain knowledge with the help of those who possess it. This must be understood from the very beginning. One must learn from him who knows."
62
"Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it."
62
"I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world."
62
"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite."
Will,
62
"The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite."
62
"For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race."
62
"Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether."
62
"Seven times have I despised my soul: The sixth time when she despised the ugliness of a face, and knew not that it was one of her own masks."
61
"There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religion."
61
"Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will."
60
"Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness."
60
"During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk."
60
"I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite."
60
"The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation."
60
"A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
60
"Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."
60
"To be is to be the value of a variable."
60
"The first professor you meet in life is your mother; the second is hardship, and the last is death."
60
"It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people."
60
"For God is my witness that I neither preached, affirmed, nor defended them, though they say that I did."
God,
59
"Don't be angry at life. It is not life that is frustrating you, it is you who are not listening to life."
59
"What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what I understand. And these two certainties--my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle--I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?"
59
"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end."
58
"The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes."
58
"What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth."
58
"Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat."
58
"Literature and philosophy both allow past idols to be resurrected with a frequency which would be truly distressing to a sober scientist."
58
"Liberal democracy - as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today's left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not."
58
"Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness."
57
"Even in our day, science suspects beyond the Polar seas, at the very circle of the Arctic Pole, the existence of a sea which never freezes and a continent which is ever green."
57
"Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one."
57
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