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Quotes by Philosopher
"Even the soberest judged it requisite to sacrifice one part of their liberty to ensure the other, as a man, dangerously wounded in any of his limbs, readily parts with it to save the rest of his body."
48
"If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!"
48
"Cowardice is the mother of cruelty."
48
"On a level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the insipid flatness of our present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects."
48
"There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done."
48
"The way of a superior man is threefold: Virtuous he is free from anxieties wise he is free from perplexities bold he is free from fear."
48
"We do not need to be shoemakers to know if our shoes fit, and just as little have we any need to be professionals to acquire knowledge of matters of universal interest."
48
"If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give."
48
"Only those thoughts which come from walking have any value."
48
"Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it."
48
"We deceive ourselves in thinking that death only follows life whereas it both goes before and will follow after it for where is the difference in not beginning or ceasing to exist the effect of both is not to be."
48
"The universe moves in the direction of Liberty."
48
"I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind."
Mind,
48
"But it is obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis. To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive."
48
"When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated."
48
"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in shackles."
48
"You say, it's dark. And in truth, I did place a cloud before your sun. But do you not see how the edges of the cloud are already glowing and turning light."
48
"Can anything be imagined so ridiculous, that this miserable and wretched creature [man], who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole?"
48
"Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor."
48
"Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself: and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being to use him as a mere means for some external purpose."
48
"When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair."
48
"Arrival in the world is really a departure and that, which we call departure, is only a return."
48
"In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state."
48
"We do not so much need the help of our friends as the confidence of their help in need."
48
"Meditation means being aware of what you are doing."
48
"But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points."
48
"No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant."
48
"Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after."
Will,
48
"Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer."
48
"If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world."
48
"Let him who would move the world first move himself."
48
"They laboriously do nothing."
48
"Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands."
48
"If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem."
Will,
48
"I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself from above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man."
48
"There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; those of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible."
48
"This is perhaps the most profound meaning of the book of Job, the best example of wisdom."
48
"People who complain about something that they cannot do anything about are as irritating as those who complain about something that they can do something about."
48
"What is it: is man only a blunder of God or God only a blunder of man?"
48
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."
48
"Nothing complements a fast mind better than a slow tongue. And nothing aggravates a slow mind better than a fast tongue."
48
"A bird is born knowing how to fly, but has to learn to conquer the skies."
48
"Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value and its face of eter1nal youth."
48
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