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Quotes by Philosopher
"Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved."
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"But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny."
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"I once tried thinking for an entire day, but I found it less valuable than one moment of study."
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"Ah, yes, superstition: it would appear to be cowardice in face of the supernatural."
51
"The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame."
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"Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn't -it's human."
51
"I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused."
51
"I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. Although I am prepared to admit that in certain times and places it has had some good effects, I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing."
51
"The Bible is one of the greatest blessings bestowed by God on the children of men. It has God for its author; salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture for its matter. It is all pure."
51
"Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished."
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"Nothing is free' asserts two things. Both assertions are true."
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"Your mind is like a tunnel that has no end, and a baloon, that even too much air cannot burst."
51
"Those who insist on the dignity of their office show they have not deserved it."
51
"What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism."
51
"Someone asked me years ago if it were true that I disliked Jews, and I replied that it was certainly true, not at all because they are Jews but because they are folks, and I don't like folks."
51
"Those who put you in difficult times are enemies. Those who forsook you in difficult times are acquaintances. Those who stood by you in difficult times are friends. Those who fought for you in difficult times are family."
51
"Not all of those who cry "The poor, the poor!" will enter the kingdom of heaven."
51
"But the first differentiation of its reflection in the manifested World is purely Spiritual, and the Beings generated in it are not endowed with a consciousness that has any relation to the one we conceive of."
51
"We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it."
51
"Love is not a feeling of happiness. Love is a willingness to sacrifice."
51
"The sun is intelligent because it never rises too early, and wise because it never sets too late."
51
"Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought."
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"For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories."
51
"Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character."
51
"We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free."
51
"Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means."
51
"If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one."
51
"It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay to antiquity its due reverence."
51
"I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked, way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the most unspeakable sufferings of mankind."
51
"It is on the acceptance or rejection of the theory of the Unity of all in Nature, in its ultimate Essence, that mainly rests the belief or unbelief in the existence around us of other conscious beings besides the Spirits of the Dead."
51
"All philosophy in two words - sustain and abstain."
51
"Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions."
51
"The state of slavery is in its own nature bad."
51
"If our life is unhappy it is painful to bear; if it is happy it is horrible to lose, So the one is pretty equal to the other."
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"The task of art today is to bring chaos into order."
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"If a ship is strong, the ocean's tides do not trouble it."
51
"It is this simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences-makes them, as the poets tell us, 'charm the crowd's ears more finely.' Educated men lay down broad general principles; uneducated men argue from common knowledge and draw obvious conclusions."
51
"Freedom, you see, is having events go in accordance with our will, never contrary to it."
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"Have no friends not equal to yourself."
51
"The body should be strong enough to obey the mind; a good servant must be strong. I know that intemperance stimulates the passions; in course of time it also destroys the body; fasting and penance often produce the same results in an opposite way. The weaker the body, the more imperious its demands; the stronger it is, the better it obeys. All sensual passions find their home in effeminate bodies; the less satisfaction they can get the keener their sting."
51
"Environmental pollution is not only humanity's treason to humanity but also a treason to all other living creatures on earth!"
51
"A good will is good not because of what it performs or effects, not by its aptness for the attainment of some proposed end, but simply by virtue of the volition - that is, it is good in itself, and considered by itself is to be esteemed much higher than all that can be brought about by it in favor of any inclination, nay, even of the sum-total of all inclinations... like a jewel, it would still shine by its own light, as a thing which has its whole value in itself."
51
"Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all."
51
"Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls."
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