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Quotes by Philosopher
"The law is not thrust upon man; it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes."
47
"God performs miracles, but even for a man to walk on water, action is required."
47
"Detach yourself from things. Your soul will be lighter and your mind will be free."
47
"Don't show off every day, or you'll stop surprising people. There must always be some novelty left over. The person who displays a little more of it each day keeps up expectations, and no one ever discovers the limits of his talent."
47
"We cannot live better than in seeking to become better."
47
"Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated."
47
"It may be you fear more to deliver judgment upon me than I fear judgment."
47
"Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much."
47
"For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles."
47
"If God gave the soul his whole creation she would not be filled thereby but only with himself."
47
"All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "Facts". They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain."
47
"In most things success depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed."
47
"The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress."
47
"Clarity is the counterbalance of profound thoughts."
47
"If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman."
47
"Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit."
47
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Nothing is required for this enlightenment except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use with and publicly in all matters."
47
"All this is applicable to the intellectual faculties of man. There is a considerable difference between one person and another as regards these faculties, as is well known to philosophers."
47
"I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics."
47
"It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!"
47
"Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not."
47
"Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind."
47
"It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call 'something there,' more deep and more general than any of the special and particular 'senses' by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; but anything else, any idea, for example, that might similarly excite it, would have that same prerogative of appearing real which objects of sense normally possess."
47
"Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance."
47
"Thirdly, even if we assume that the world is governed by purpose, we need only add that this purpose - or, if there are several, at least one of them - is not especially intent on preventing suffering, whether it is indifferent to suffering or actually rejoices in it."
47
"Men sometimes feel injured by praise because it assigns a limit to their merit; few people are modest enough not to take offense that one appreciates them."
47
"To know that you do not know is the best.To think you know when you do not is a disease.Recognizing this disease as a disease is to be free of it."
47
"A so-called happy marriage corresponds to love as a correct poem to an improvised song."
47
"The great and admirable strength of America consists in this, that America is truly the American people."
47
"Further, there are things of which the mind understands one part, but remains ignorant of the other; and when man is able to comprehend certain things, it does not follow that he must be able to comprehend everything."
47
"Ask yourself whether you are happy and you will cease to be so."
47
"There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money - and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact."
47
"If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner."
47
"You are this, which does not satisfy, so you want to be that. If there were an understanding of this, would that come into being? Because you do not understand this, you create that, hoping through that to understand or to escape from this."
47
"When you reach the end of what you should know, you will be at the beginning of what you should sense."
47
"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!'- that is the motto of enlightenment."
47
"Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation."
47
"I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that's a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy."
47
"Be convinced that, if man were able to reach the end without preparatory studies, such studies would not be preparatory but tiresome and utterly superfluous."
47
"Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate."
47
"All the evolution we know of proceeds from the vague to the definite."
47
"There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home."
47
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