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Aristotle.txt

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+Be a free thinker and don't accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in.
+Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.
+To appreciate the beauty of a snow flake, it is necessary to stand out in the cold.
+He who cannot be a good follower cannot be a good leader.
+The weak are always anxious for justice and equality. The strong pay no heed to either.
+Courage is the first virtue that makes all other virtues possible.
+Laughter is a bodily exercise, precious to Health
+Greatness of spirit is accompanied by simplicity and sincerity.
+Life is only meaningful when we are striving for a goal .
+The most important relationship we can all have is the one you have with yourself, the most important journey you can take is one of self-discovery. To know yourself, you must spend time with yourself, you must not be afraid to be alone. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
+Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
+The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
+95% of everything you do is the result of habit.
+A tragedy is that moment where the hero comes face to face with his true identity.
+Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.
+It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.
+Our problem is not that we aim too high and miss, but that we aim too low and hit.
+Criticism is something we can avoid easily
+by saying nothing, doing nothing,
+and being nothing.
+At the intersection where your gifts, talents, and abilities meet a human need; therein you will discover your purpose
+A fool contributes nothing worth hearing and takes offense at everything.
+Happiness is a quality of the soul...not a function of one's material circumstances.
+The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
+The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.
+Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
+True happiness comes from gaining insight and growing into your best possible self. Otherwise all you're having is immediate gratification pleasure, which is fleeting and doesn't grow you as a person.
+The intelligence consists not only in the knowledge but also in the skill to apply the knowledge into practice.
+Doubt is the beginning of wisdom
+The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.
+Humility is a flower which does not grow in everyone's garden.
+The best things are placed between extremes.
+Character is determined by choice, not opinion.
+Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
+The worst thing about slavery is that the slaves eventually get to like it.
+We can't learn without pain.
+Think as the wise men think, but talk like the simple people do.
+We are what we repeatedly do... excellence, therefore, isn't just an act, but a habit and life isn't just a series of events, but an ongoing process of self-definition.
+Life cannot be lived, and understood, simultaneously.
+Excellence is an art won by training and habituation.
+The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
+Tyrants preserve themselves by sowing fear and mistrust among the citizens by means of spies, by distracting them with foreign wars, by eliminating men of spirit who might lead a revolution, by humbling the people, and making them incapable of decisive action.
+He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.
+The fool tells me his reason; the wise man persuades me with my own.
+Only an armed people can be truly free. Only an unarmed people can ever be enslaved.
+You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.
+Masculine republics give way to feminine democracies, and feminine democracies give way to tyranny.
+If something's bound to happen, it will
+happen.. Right time, right person, and for
+the best reason.
+Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.
+A friend of everyone is a friend of no one
+What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good.
+Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.
+It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
+Before you heal the body you must first heal the mind
+Character is revealed through action.
+Music directly represents the passions of the soul. If one listens to the wrong kind of music, he will become the wrong kind of person.
+The high-minded man does not bear grudges, for it is not the mark of a great soul to remember injuries, but to forget them.
+The proof that you know something is that you are able to teach it
+One may go wrong in many different ways, but right only in one, which is why it is easy to fail and difficult to succeed.
+For both excessive and insufficient exercise destroy one's strength, and both eating and drinking too much or too little destroy health, whereas the right quantity produces, increases and preserves it. So it is the same with temperance, courage and the other virtues. This much then, is clear: in all our conduct it is the mean that is to be commended.
+First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.
+Those who are not angry at the things they should be angry at are thought to be fools, and so are those who are not angry in the right way, at the right time, or with the right persons.
+When there is no middle class, and the poor greatly exceed in number, troubles arise, and the state soon comes to an end.
+I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.
+He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander.
+Today, see if you can stretch your heart and expand your love so that it touches not only those to whom you can give it easily, but also to those who need it so much.
+No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.
+Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
+Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it; men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players by playing the harp. In the same way, by doing just acts we come to be just; by doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled ; and by doing brave acts, we become brave.
+The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity of the dissimilar.
+The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is.
+Courage is the mother of all virtues because without it, you cannot consistently perform the others.
+Teenagers these days are out of control. They eat like pigs, they are disrespectful of adults, they interrupt and contradict their parents, and they terrorize their teachers.
+Character is made by many acts; it may be lost by a single one.
+The man who is truly good and wise will bear with dignity whatever fortune sends, and will always make the best of his circumstances.
+Find the good. Seek the Unity. Ignore the divisions among us.
+The greatest of all pleasures is the pleasure of learning.
+The tyrant, who in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them permanent need of a chief.
+Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
+The hardest victory is the victory over self.
+Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
+Fortune favours the bold.
+You are what you repeatedly do
+Your happiness depends on you alone.
+Patience s bitter, but it's fruit is sweet.
+Wise people have an inward sense of what is beautiful, and the highest wisdom is to trust this intuition and be guided by it.
+Knowledge of the fact differs from knowledge of the reason for the fact.
+The energy of the mind is the essence of life.
+The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.
+Our feelings towards our friends reflect our feelings towards ourselves.
+They - Young People have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things - and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: Their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning - all their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They overdo everything - they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else.
+Through discipline comes freedom.
+The quality of life is determined by its activities.
+What you have to learn to do, you learn by doing.
+Man is a goal-seeking animal. His life only has meaning if he is reaching out and striving for his goals.
+All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.
+A goal gets us motivated,while a good habit keeps us stay motivated.
+The best way to avoid envy is to deserve the success you get.
+You can never learn anything that you did not already know
+There is nothing unequal as the equal treatment of unequals.
+Virtue means doing the right thing, in relation to the right person, at the right time, to the right extent, in the right manner, and for the right purpose. Thus, to give money away is quite a simple task, but for the act to be virtuous, the donor must give to the right person, for the right purpose, in the right amount, in the right manner, and at the right time.
+It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen.
+Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.
+We are the sum of our actions, and therefore our habits make all the difference.
+It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit
+Let us first understand the facts and then we may seek the cause.
+We laugh at that which we cannot bear to face.
+Peace is more difficult than war.
+You are what you do repeatedly.
+Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God.
+The greatest crimes are caused by surfeit, not by want.
+To Unlearn is as hard as to Learn
+Every man should be responsible to others, nor should any one be allowed to do just as he pleases; for where absolute freedom is allowed, there is nothing to restrain the evil which is inherent in every man.
+The only way to achieve true success is to express yourself completely in service to society.
+Friends hold a mirror up to each other; through that mirror they can see each other in ways that would not otherwise be accessible to them, and it is this mirroring that helps them improve themselves as persons.
+A proper wife should be as obedient as a slave... The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities - a natural defectiveness.
+Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
+Love well, be loved and do something of value.
+Happiness is a state of activity.
+Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.
+Fine friendship requires duration rather than fitful intensity.
+The physician himself, if sick, actually calls in another physician, knowing that he cannot reason correctly if required to judge his own condition while suffering.
+Money is a guarantee that we can have what we want in the future
+Those who cannot bravely face danger are the slaves of their attackers.
+The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.
+Happiness belongs to the self sufficient.
+Health is a matter of choice, not a mystery of chance
+To love someone is to identify with them.
+He overcomes a stout enemy who overcomes his own anger.
+All men seek one goal: success or happiness.
+Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.
+It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom.
+Philosophy begins with wonder.
+Speech is the representation of the mind, and writing is the representation of speech.
+Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend.
+We should aim rather at leveling down our desires than leveling up our means.
+At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.
+It would be wrong to put friendship before the truth.
+The difference between a learned man and an ignorant one is the same as that between a living man and a corpse.
+A promise made must be a promise kept.
+Of the tyrant, spies and informers are the principal instruments. War is his favorite occupation, for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people, and making himself necessary to them as their leader.
+Nature creates nothing without a purpose.
+There are no experienced young people. Time makes experience.
+Where your talents and the needs of the world cross; there lies your vocation.
+The man who is content to live alone is either a beast or a god.
+The soul suffers when the body is diseased or traumatized, while the body suffers when the soul is ailing.
+Fate of empires depends on the education of youth
+Obstinate people can be divided into the opinionated, the ignorant, and the boorish.
+All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
+The ideal man is his own best friend and takes delight in privacy.
+Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
+A gentleman is not disturbed by anything
+He who cannot see the truth for himself, nor, hearing it from others, store it away in his mind, that man is utterly worthless.
+It is not sufficient to know what one ought to say, but one must also know how to say it.
+Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, therein lies your vocation. These two, your talents and the needs of the world, are the great wake up calls to your true vocation in life... to ignore this, is in some sense, is to lose your soul.
+The best way to teach morality is to make it a habit with children.
+Hope is a waking dream.
+It is better for a city to be governed by a good man than by good laws.
+Men become richer not only by increasing their existing wealth but also by decreasing their expenditure.
+All friendly feelings toward others come from the friendly feelings a person has for himself.
+Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.
+It belongs to small-mindedness to be unable to bear either honor or dishonor, either good fortune or bad, but to be filled with conceit when honored and puffed up by trifling good fortune, and to be unable to bear even the smallest dishonor and to deem any chance failure a great misfortune, and to be distressed and annonyed at everything. Moreover the small-minded man is the sort of person to call all slights an insult and dishonor, even those that are due to ignorance or forgetfulness. Small-mindedness is accompanied by pettiness, querulousness, pessimism and self-abasement.
+The end of labor is to gain leisure.
+The self-indulgent man craves for all pleasant things... and is led by his appetite to choose these at the cost of everything else.
+Friendship is a thing most necessary to life, since without friends no one would choose to live, though possessed of all other advantages.
+A democracy exists whenever those who are free and are not well-off, being in the majority, are in sovereign control of government, an oligarchy when control lies with the rich and better-born, these being few.
+There is honor in being a dog.
+If you see a man approaching with the obvious intent of doing you good, run for your life.
+Consider pleasures as they depart, not as they come.
+God and nature create nothing that does not fulfill a purpose
+Art is a higher type of knowledge than experience.
+Nature does nothing in vain.
+The character which results from wealth is that of a prosperous fool.
+Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
+It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.
+Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.
+Authority is no source for Truth.
+People do not naturally become morally excellent or practically wise. They become so, if at all, only as the result of lifelong personal and community effort.
+Reason is a light that God has kindled in the soul.
+What we expect, that we find.
+We are better able to study our neighbours than ourselves, and their actions than our own.
+We work to earn our leisure.
+Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.
+Female cats are very Lascivious, and make advances to the male.
+Wit is well-bred insolence.
+Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.
+He who sees things grow from the beginning will have the best view of them.
+Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.
+If men are given food, but no chastisement nor any work, they become insolent.
+Friends are much better tried in bad fortune than in good.
+Happiness is the reward of virtue.
+It is the characteristic of the magnanimous man to ask no favor but to be ready to do kindness to others.
+The senses are gateways to the intelligence. There is nothing in the intelligence which did not first pass through the senses.
+We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.
+It is more difficult to organize a peace than to win a war; but the fruits of victory will be lost if the peace is not organized.
+What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.
+If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development
+If things do not turn out as we wish, we should wish for them as they turn out.
+Man is by nature a political animal.
+The ultimate end...is not knowledge, but action. To be half right on time may be more important than to obtain the whole truth too late.
+The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.
+Saying the words that come from knowledge is no sign of having it.
+A friend is another I.
+The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
+Worthless persons appointed to have supreme control of weighty affairs do a lot of damage.
+The habits we form from childhood make no small difference, but rather they make all the difference.
+Our characters are the result of our conduct.
+The soul never thinks without a picture.
+Perception starts with the eye.
+There's many a slip between the cup and the lip.
+The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.
+Men are marked from the moment of birth to rule or be ruled.
+My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.
+To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.
+We should behave to our friends as we would wish our friends behave to us
+Happiness does not consist in pastimes and amusements but in virtuous activities.
+Truth is a remarkable thing. We cannot miss knowing some of it. But we cannot know it entirely.
+Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy, while the other does not allow his neighbour to have them through envy.
+Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.
+We are what we do.
+Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.
+He who hath many friends hath none.
+No state will be well administered unless the middle class holds sway.
+By myth I mean the arrangement of the incidents
+The honors and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action.
+Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.
+Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.
+No one loves the man whom he fears.
+Now the greatest external good we should assume to be the thing which we offer as a tribute to the gods, and which is most coveted by men of high station, and is the prize awarded for the noblest deeds; and such a thing is honor, for honor is clearly the greatest of external goods.
+For what one has to learn to do, we learn by doing.
+Happiness is the settling of the soul into its most appropriate spot.
+It is no easy task to be good.
+Nature of man is not what he was born as, but what he is born for.
+Worms are the intestines of the earth.
+True happiness flows from the possession of wisdom and virtue and not from the possession of external goods.
+The hand is the tool of tools.
+Friends enhance our ability to think and act.
+We are what we frequently do.
+A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
+Beauty is the gift of God
+Bad people...are in conflict with themselves; they desire one thing and will another, like the incontinent who choose harmful pleasures instead of what they themselves believe to be good.
+Good moral character is not something that we can achieve on our own. We need a culture that supports the conditions under which self-love and friendship flourish.
+To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.
+Teachers, who educate children, deserve more honour than parents, who merely gave them birth; for the latter provided mere life, while the former ensure a good life.
+Money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.
+The complete man must work, study and wrestle.
+The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life - knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.
+Well begun is half done.
+Even that some people try deceived me many times ... I will not fail to believe that somewhere, someone deserves my trust.
+A person's life persuades better than his word.
+All Earthquakes and Disasters are warnings; there�s too much corruption in the world
+For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with the arms of intelligence and with moral qualities which he may use for the worst ends. Wherefore, if he have not virtue, he is the most unholy and the most savage of animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony. But justice is the bond of men in states, and the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society.
+A common danger unites even the bitterest enemies.
+Being a father is the most rewarding thing a man whose career has plateaued can do.
+It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.
+Maybe crying is a means of cleaning yourself out emotionally. Or maybe it's your last resort; the only way to express yourself when words fail, the same as when you were a baby and had no words.
+Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.
+Nature does nothing in vain. Therefore, it is imperative for persons to act in accordance with their nature and develop their latent talents, in order to be content and complete.
+The ideal man takes joy in doing favors for others.
+Yes the truth is that men's ambition and their desire to make money are among the most frequent causes of deliberate acts of injustice.
+Try is a noisy way of doing nothing.
+Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.
+He is his own best friend and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy and is afraid of solitude.
+A king ruleth as he ought, a tyrant as he lists, a king to the profit of all, a tyrant only to please a few.
+One thing alone not even God can do,To make undone whatever hath been done.
+Consider pleasures as they depart, not as they come.
+You should never think without an image.
+The actuality of thought is life.
+Gentleness is the ability to bear reproaches and slights with moderation, and not to embark on revenge quickly, and not to be easily provoked to anger, but be free from bitterness and contentiousness, having tranquility and stability in the spirit.
+The greatest victory is over self.
+Wickedness is nourished by lust.
+Intuition is the source of scientific knowledge.
+All proofs rest on premises.
+Friends are an aid to the young, to guard them from error; to the elderly, to attend to their wants and to supplement their failing power of action; to those in the prime of life, to assist them to noble deeds.
+When you feel yourself lacking something, send your thoughts towards your Intimate and search for the Divinity that lives within you.
+When...we, as individuals, obey laws that direct us to behave for the welfare of the community as a whole, we are indirectly helping to promote the pursuit of happiness by our fellow human beings.
+Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.
+Business or toil is merely utilitarian. It is necessary but does not enrich or ennoble a human life.
+Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?
+Goodness is to do good to the deserving and love the good and hate the wicked, and not to be eager to inflict punishment or take vengeance, but to be gracious and kindly and forgiving.
+For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first.
+The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men's everyday wants.
+Self-sufficiency is both a good and an absolute good.
+Liars when they speak the truth are not believed.
+Happiness involves engagement in activities that promote one's highest potentials.
+The Life of the intellect is the best and pleasantest for man, because the intellect more than anything else is the man. Thus it will be the happiest life as well.
+Music directly imitates the passions or states of the soul...when one listens to music that imitates a certain passion, he becomes imbued withthe same passion; and if over a long time he habitually listens to music that rouses ignoble passions, his whole character will be shaped to an ignoble form.
+We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace.
+Meanness is incurable; it cannot be cured by old age, or by anything else.
+There is no genius who hasn't a touch of insanity.
+We must be neither cowardly nor rash but courageous.
+Memory is the scribe of the soul.
+Each human being is bred with a unique set of potentials that yearn to be fulfilled as surely as the acorn yearns to become the oak within it.
+The true nature of anything is what it becomes at its highest.
+Why do men seek honour? Surely in order to confirm the favorable opinion they have formed of themselves.
+Salt water when it turns into vapour becomes sweet, and the vapour does not form salt water when it condenses again. This I know by experiment. The same thing is true in every case of the kind: wine and all fluids that evaporate and condense back into a liquid state become water. They all are water modified by a certain admixture, the nature of which determines their flavour.
+To give away money is an easy matter and in any man's power. But to decide to whom to give it and how large and when, and for what purpose and how, is neither in every man's power nor an easy matter.
+Democracy is the form of government in which the free are rulers.
+Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.
+Neither should we forget the mean, which at the present day is lost sight of in perverted forms of government; for many practices which appear to be democratical are the ruin of democracies, . . Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state.
+A flatterer is a friend who is your inferior, or pretends to be so.
+That which is excellent endures.
+The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
+A man's happiness consists in the free exercise of his highest faculties.
+For what is the best choice for each individual is the highest it is possible for him to achieve.
+Good has two meanings: it means that which is good absolutely and that which is good for somebody.
+Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
+Law is mind without reason.
+Those who act receive the prizes.
+Suppose, then, that all men were sick or deranged, save one or two of them who were healthy and of right mind. It would then be the latter two who would be thought to be sick and deranged and the former not!
+That which is impossible and probable is better than that which is possible and improbable.
+A man becomes a friend whenever being loved he loves in return.
+We are what we continually do.
+Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses and avoids.
+Education and morals make the good man, the good statesman, the good ruler.
+The young are heated by Nature as drunken men by wine.
+Happiness is a certain activity of soul in conformity with perfect goodness
+Revolutions are effected in two ways, by force and by fraud.
+What soon grows old? Gratitude.
+Education and morals will be found almost the whole that goes to make a good man.
+Experience has shown that it is difficult, if not impossible, for a populous state to be run by good laws.
+Wonder implies the desire to learn.
+Bad men are full of repentance.
+Every man should be responsible to others, nor should anyone be allowed to do just as he pleases; for where absolute freedom is allowed there is nothing to restrain the evil which is inherent in every man. But the principle of responsibility secures that which is the greatest good in states; the right persons rule and are prevented from doing wrong, and the people have their due. It is evident that this is the best kind of democracy, and why? because the people are drawn from a certain class.
+It was through the feeling of wonder that men now and at first began to philosophize.
+When you ask a dumb question, you get a smart answer.
+It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.
+The angry man wishes the object of his anger to suffer in return; hatred wishes its object not to exist.
+The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.
+Men are divided between those who are as thrifty as if they would live forever, and those who are as extravagant as if they were going to die the next day.
+There are branches of learning and education which we must study merely with a view to leisure spent in intellectual activity, and these are to be valued for their own sake; whereas those kinds of knowledge which are useful in business are to be deemed necessary, and exist for the sake of other things.
+The soul becomes prudent by sitting and being quiet.
+Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.
+Nothing is what rocks dream about
+The aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought....The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful.
+The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.
+There are two distinctive peculiarities by reference to which we characterize the soul (1) local movement and (2) thinking, discriminating, and perceiving. Thinking both speculative and practical is regarded as akin to a form of perceiving; for in the one as well as the other the soul discriminates and is cognizant of something which is.
+The antidote for fifty enemies is one friend.
+Happiness is the utilization of one's talents along lines of excellence.
+It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
+In educating the young we steer them by the rudders of pleasure and pain
+PLOT is CHARACTER revealed by ACTION.
+Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.
+For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements.
+Virtue makes us aim at the right end, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means.
+To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.
+Even the best of men in authority are liable to be corrupted by passion. We may conclude then that the law is reason without passion, and it is therefore preferable to any individual.
+Personal beauty requires that one should be tall; little people may have charm and elegance, but beauty-no.
+The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.
+Thinking is different from perceiving and is held to be in part imagination, in part judgment
+The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.
+Philosophy can make people sick.
+Women should marry when they are about eighteen years of age, and men at seven and thirty; then they are in the prime of life, and the decline in the powers of both will coincide.
+It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.
+The saying of Protagoras is like the views we have mentioned; he said that man is the measure of all things, meaning simply that that which seems to each man assuredly is. If this is so, it follows that the same thing both is and is not, and is bad and good, and that the contents of all other opposite statements are true, because often a particular thing appears beautiful to some and ugly to others, and that which appears to each man is the measure
+The activity of happiness must occupy an entire lifetime; for one swallow does not a summer make.
+The intention makes the crime.
+Democracy appears to be safer and less liable to revolution than oligarchy. For in oligarchies there is the double danger of the oligarchs falling out among themselves and also with the people; but in democracies there is only the danger of a quarrel with the oligarchs. No dissension worth mentioning arises among the people themselves. And we may further remark that a government which is composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy than to oligarchy, and is the safest of the imperfect forms of government.
+One who faces and who fears the right things and from the right motive, in the right way and at the right time, posseses character worthy of our trust and admiration.
+Civil confusions often spring from trifles but decide great issues.
+Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry. No very small animal can be beautiful, for looking at it takes so small a portion of time that the impression of it will be confused. Nor can any very large one, for a whole view of it cannot be had at once, and so there will be no unity and completeness.
+The brave man, if he be compared with the coward, seems foolhardy; and, if with the foolhardy man, seems a coward.
+How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms
+A true disciple shows his appreciation by reaching further than his teacher.
+Youth loves honor and victory more than money.
+Education is the best provision for old age.
+All men by nature desire knowledge.
+Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.
+The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.
+But is it just then that the few and the wealthy should be the rulers? And what if they, in like manner, rob and plunder the people, - is this just?
+All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.
+Sophocles said he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were.
+Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character ofthe speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.
+A very populous city can rarely, if ever, be well governed.
+The Eyes are the organs of temptation, and the Ears are the organs of instruction.
+Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. The tragic plot must not be composed of irrational parts.
+To be angry is easy. But to be angry with the right man at the right time and in the right manner, that is not easy.
+Definition of tragedy: A hero destroyed by the excess of his virtues
+Every rascal is not a thief, but every thief is a rascal.
+The law is reason unaffected by desire.
+Happiness comes from theperfect practice of virtue.
+Every wicked man is in ignorance as to what he ought to do, and from what to abstain, and it is because of error such as this that men become unjust and, in a word, wicked.
+The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.
+Between husband and wife friendship seems to exist by nature, for man is naturally disposed to pairing.
+The pleasures arising from thinking and learning will make us think and learn all the more.

Arthur-Schopenhauer-Quotes.txt

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+It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.
+All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
+The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.
+The majority of men... are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and... are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.
+A pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts.
+A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
+We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.
+Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
+Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes.
+A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial.
+Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
+Education perverts the mind since we are directly opposing the natural development of our mind by obtaining ideas first and observations last. This is why so few men of learning have such sound common sense as is quite common among the illiterate.
+If we suspect that a man is lying, we should pretend to believe him; for then he becomes bold and assured, lies more vigorously, and is unmasked.
+The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.
+Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed.
+The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.
+We seldom think of what we have but always of what we lack. Therefore, rather than grateful, we are bitter.
+The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
+The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.
+Women remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand, cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to the most important.
+The Universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.
+You are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want.
+What people commonly call fate is mostly their own stupidity.
+Always to see the general in the particular is the very foundation of genius.
+To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence.
+Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance.
+Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law.
+He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.
+I know of no more beautiful prayer than that which the Hindus of old used in closing: May all that have life be delivered from suffering.
+A happy life is impos�si�ble; the best that a man can attain is a heroic life.
+It is difficult to keep quiet if you have nothing to do
+If you feel irritated by the absurd remarks of two people whose conversation you happen to overhear, you should imagine that you are listening to a dialogue of two fools in a comedy.
+Do not shorten the morning by getting up late, or waste it in unworthy occupations or in talk; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred. Evening is like old age: we are languid, talkative, silly. Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
+The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
+Truth is no harlot who throws her arms round the neck of him who does not desire her; on the contrary, she is so coy a beauty that even the man who sacrifices everything to her can still not be certain of her favors.
+We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others. The latter are the rule and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egotists in the noblest meaning of the word.
+I observed once to Goethe that when a friend is with us we do not think the same of him as when he is away. He replied, "Yes! because the absent friend is yourself, and he exists only in your head; whereas the friend who is present has an individuality of his own, and moves according to laws of his own, which cannot always be in accordance with those which you form for yourself.
+Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.
+Man is never happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so.
+Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.
+After your death you will be what you were before your birth.
+We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire a knowledge of the superficial nature of their thoughts, the narrowness of their views and of the number of their errors. Whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honor.
+If anyone spends almost the whole day in reading...he gradually loses the capacity for thinking...This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid
+There is something in us that is wiser than our head.
+To feel envy is human, to savour schadenfreude is devilish
+To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.
+Wicked thoughts and worthless efforts gradually set their mark on the face, especially the eyes.
+Vulgar people take huge delight in the faults and follies of great men.
+Consider the Koran... this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value.
+Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.
+We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.
+If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?
+Genius and madness have something in common: both live in a world that is different from that which exists for everyone else.
+The life of every individual is really always a tragedy, but gone through in detail, it has the character of a comedy.
+Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
+The real meaning of persona is a mask, such as actors were accustomed to wear on the ancient stage; and it is quite true that no one shows himself as he is, but wears his mask and plays his part. Indeed, the whole of our social arrangements may be likened to a perpetual comedy; and this is why a man who is worth anything finds society so insipid, while a blockhead is quite at home in it.
+The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.
+What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.
+In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death.
+Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
+Man is the only animal who causes pain to others with no other object than wanting to do so.
+The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy.
+Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.
+Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.
+Great men are like eagles, and build their nest on some lofty solitude.
+Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
+When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it's a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect.
+The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.
+Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" as the poet said "erected in the sea of time." They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.
+No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.
+Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.
+Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.
+Our life is a loan received from death with sleep as the daily interest on this loan.
+Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.
+Optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man's happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence.
+If God made the world, I would not be that God, for the misery of the world would break my heart.
+What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.
+Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.
+Style is what gives value and currency to thoughts.
+A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man
+Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.
+Religions are like fireflies. They require darkness in order to shine.
+That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom . . .
+The greatest wisdom is to make the enjoyment of the present the supreme object of life; because that is the only reality, all else being merely the play of thought. On the other hand, such a course might just as well be called the greatest folly: for that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly, like a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.
+The deep pain that is felt
+at the death of every friendly soul
+arises from the feeling that there is
+in every individual something
+which is inexpressible,
+peculiar to him alone,
+and is, therefore,
+absolutely and irretrievably lost.
+Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are its tormented souls.
+The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it.
+Genius is its own reward; for the best that one is, one must necessarily be for oneself. . . . Further, genius consists in the working of the free intellect., and as a consequence the productions of genius serve no useful purpose. The work of genius may be music, philosophy, painting, or poetry; it is nothing for use or profit. To be useless and unprofitable is one of the characteristics of genius; it is their patent of nobility.
+Life without pain has no meaning.
+Students and scholars of all kinds and of every age aim, as a rule, only at information, not insight. They make it a point of honour to have information about everything, every stone, plant, battle, or experiment and about all books, collectively and individually. It never occurs to them that information is merely a means to insight, but in itself is of little or no value.
+All religions promise a reward beyond life, in eternity, for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding.
+Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.
+Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment - a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man's existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.
+It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.
+One should use common words to say uncommon things
+To be alone is the fate of all great minds�a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.
+Life is a constant process of dying.
+Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.
+The world is not a factory and animals are not products for our use
+Life is a business that does not cover the costs.
+The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
+There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.
+The present is the only reality and the only certainty.
+Scoundrels are always sociable.
+A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?
+People of Wealth and the so called upper class suffer the most from boredom.
+The tallest oak tree once was an acorn that any pig could have swallowed.
+This world could not have been the work of an all-loving being, but that of a devil, who had brought creatures into existence in order to delight in the sight of their sufferings.
+The reason domestic pets are so lovable and so helpful to us is because they enjoy, quietly and placidly, the present moment.
+However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him up one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study in order to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, because they bear what should have bourne them.
+No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.
+Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.
+In their hearts women think that it is men's business to earn money and theirs to spend it.
+The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.
+What people commonly call Fate is, as a general rule, nothing but their own stupid and foolish conduct.
+There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet man believes that death is the annhilation of his being.
+This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.
+I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless, standing in universal admiration and honour.
+The young should early be trained to bear being left alone; for it is a source of happiness and peace of mind.
+Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
+Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.
+If the lives of men were relieved of all need, hardship and adversity; if everything they took in hand were successful, they would be so swollen with arrogance that, though they might not burst, they would present the spectacle of unbridled folly-nay, they would go mad. And I may say, further, that a certain amount of care or pain or trouble is necessary for every man at all times. A ship without ballast is unstable and will not go straight.
+Human life, like all inferior goods, is covered on the outside with a false glitter; what suffers always conceals itself.
+There is only one inborn error. and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.
+Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.
+Men are a thousand times more intent on becoming rich than on acquiring culture, though it is quite certain that what a man IS contributes more to his happiness than what he HAS.
+Materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.
+Intellect is a magnitude of intensity, not a magnitude of extensity.
+Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost.
+There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and at the same time, all-powerful being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be.
+Still, instead of trusting what their own minds tell them, men have as a rule a weakness for trusting others who pretend to supernatural sources of knowledge.
+A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.
+A man can surely do what he wills to do, but cannot determine what he wills.
+The highest, most varied and lasting pleasures are those of the mind.
+If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad ones; for life is short, and time and energy limited.
+We seldom speak of what we have but often of what we lack.
+It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer
+There is only one inborn erroneous notion ... that we exist in order to be happy ... So long as we persist in this inborn error ... the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence ... hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of ... disappointment.
+Rudeness is better than any argument; it totally eclipses intellect.
+Patriotism is the passion of fools and the most foolish of passions.
+I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus, and Plato.
+Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.
+First the truth is ridiculed. Then it meets outrage. Then it is said to have been obvious all along.
+It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy.
+With health, everything is a source of pleasure; without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, is enjoyable...Healt h is by far the most important element in human happiness.
+Every generation, no matter how paltry its character, thinks itself much wiser than the one immediately preceding it, let alone those that are more remote.
+Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.
+Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.
+Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.
+Everybody's friend is nobody's.
+Many books serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up.
+I am often surprised by the cleverness, and now and again by the stupidity, of my dog; and I have similar experiences with mankind.
+Every satisfaction he attains lays the seeds of some new desire, so that there is no end to the wishes of each individual will.
+Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism.
+Style is the physiognomy of the mind. It is more infallible than that of the body. To imitate the style of another is said to be wearing a mask. However beautiful it may be, it is through its lifelessness insipid and intolerable, so that even the most ugly living face is more engaging.
+There is in the world only the choice between loneliness and vulgarity. All young people should be taught now to put up with loneliness ... because the less man is compelled to come into contact with others, the better off he is.
+Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life.
+The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.
+Restlessness is the hallmark of existence.
+Man may have the most excellent judgment in all other matters, and yet go wrong in those which concern himself; because here the will comes in and deranges the intellect at once. Therefore let a man take counsel of a friend. A doctor can cure everyone but himself; if he falls ill, he sends for a colleague.
+Animals learn death first at the moment of death;...man approaches death with the knowledge it is closer every hour, and this creates a feeling of uncertainty over his life, even for him who forgets in the business of life that annihilation is awaiting him. It is for this reason chiefly that we have philosophy and religion.
+Men best show their character in trifles, where they are not on their guard. It is in the simplest habits, that we often see the boundless egotism which pays no regard to the feelings of others and denies nothing to itself.
+Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.
+That a god like Jehovah should have created this world of misery and woe, out of pure caprice, and because he enjoyed doing it, and should then have clapped his hands in praise of his own work, and declared everything to be very good-that will not do at all!
+Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to dramatic art, for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible.
+Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.
+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.
+Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.
+Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.
+To forgive and forget means to throw away dearly bought experience.
+Because Christian morality leaves animals out of account, they are at once outlawed in philosophical morals; they are mere 'things,' mere means to any ends whatsoever. They can therefore be used for vivisection, hunting, coursing, bullfights, and horse racing, and can be whipped to death as they struggle along with heavy carts of stone. Shame on such a morality that is worthy of pariahs, and that fails to recognize the eternal essence that exists in every living thing, and shines forth with inscrutable significance from all eyes that see the sun!
+The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is in arriving at maturity. A man reaches the maturity of his reasoning powers and mental faculties hardly before the age of twenty-eight; a woman at eighteen.
+There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.
+How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.
+To desire immortality is to desire the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake
+There is not much to be got anywhere in the world. It is filled with misery and pain; if a man escapes these, boredeom lies in wait for him at every corner. Nay more; it is evil which generally has the upper hand, and folly that makes the most noise. Fate is cruel and mankind pitiable.
+Whoever wants his judgment to be believed, should express it coolly and dispassionately; for all vehemence springs from the will. And so the judgment might be attributed to the will and not to knowledge, which by its nature is cold.
+Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves; therefore the former make us universally popular, the latter unpopular.
+Imagination is strong in a man when that particular function of the brain which enables him to observe is roused to activity without any necessary excitement of the sense. Accordingly, we find that imagination is active just in proportion as our sense are not excited by external objects. A long period of solitude, whether in prison or in a sick room; quiet, twilight, darkness-these are the things that promote its activity; and under their influence it comes into play of itself.
+The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
+To attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and�though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving only as the road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely in expectation of which they lived.
+The fourfold root of the principle of sufficent reason is "Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives.
+(Politeness is) a tacit agreement that people's miserable defects, whether moral or intellectual, shall on either side be ignored and not be made the subject of reproach.
+Human existence is an error...it is bad today and every day it gets worse, until the worst happens.
+The little incidents and accidents of every day fill us with emotion, anxiety, annoyance, passion, as long as they are close to us, when they appear so big, so important, so serious; but as soon as they are borne down the restless stream of time they lose what significance they had; we think no more of them and soon forget them altogether. They were big only because they were near.
+I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it.
+If a relationship is perfectly natural there will be a complete fusion of the happiness of both of you-owing to fellow-feeling and various other laws which govern our natures, this is, quite simply, the greatest happiness that can exist.
+The charlatan takes very different shapes according to circumstances; but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of
+it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish and material.
+A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.
+Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.
+Every truth passes through 3 stages before it is recognized 1)ridicule 2) opposition 3) accepted as self-evident.
+The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.
+In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.
+There is one respect in which beasts show real wisdom... their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.
+If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.
+Faith is like love: it does not let itself be forced.
+A man's delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.
+If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.
+It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.
+Poverty and slavery are thus only two forms ofthe same thing, the essence of which is that a man's energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others.
+Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence, with the certainty of losing it at last.
+For, after all, the foundation of our whole nature, and, therefore, of our happiness, is our physique, and the most essential factor in happiness is health, and, next in importance after health, the ability to maintain ourselves in independence and freedom from care.
+The scenes and events of long ago, and the persons who took part in them, wear a charming aspect to the eye of memory, which sees only the outlines and takes no note of disagreeable details. The present enjoys no such advantage, and so it always seems defective.
+Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.
+Compassion is the basis of morality.
+The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.
+To become indignant at [people's] conduct is as foolish as to be angry with a stone because it rolls into your path. And with many people the wisest thing you can do, is to resolve to make use of those whom you cannot alter.
+Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.
+For it is a matter of daily observation that people take the greatest pleasure in that which satisfies their vanity; and vanity cannot be satisfied without comparison with others.
+No one knows what capacities for doing and suffering he has in himself, until something comes to rouse them to activity: just as in a pond of still water, lying there like a mirror, there is no sign of the roar and thunder with which it can leap from the precipice, and yet remain what it is; or again, rise high in the air as a fountain. When water is as cold as ice, you can have no idea of the latent warmth contained in it.
+Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought.
+Necessity is the constant scourge of the lower classes, ennui of the higher ones.
+For our improvement we need a mirror.
+To conceal a want of real ideas, many make for themselves an imposing apparatus of long compound words, intricate flourishes and phrases, new and unheard-of expressions, all of which together furnish an extremely difficult jargon that sounds very learned. Yet with all this they say-precisely nothing.
+A man's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man's thoughts and aspirations.
+Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.
+Mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity.
+When a man has reached a condition in which he believes that a thing must happen because he does not wish it, and that what he wishes to happen never will be, this is really the state called desperation.
+In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.
+If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
+No one can transcend their own individuality.
+As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.
+It is most important to allow the brain the full measure of sleep which is required to restore it; for sleep is to a man's whole nature what winding up is to a clock.
+Will without intellect is the most vulgar and common thing in the world, possessed by every blockhead, who, in the gratification of his passions, shows the stuff of which he is made.
+Ignorance is degrading only when found in company with great riches.
+Human life must be some form of mistake.
+It is with trifles, and when he is off guard, that a man best reveals his character.
+universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
+To buy books would be a good thing if we could also buy the time to read them; but the purchase of books is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their contents.
+That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.
+Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
+Each day is a little life.
+We deceive and flatter no one by such delicate artificies as we do our own selves.
+They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
+What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.
+Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other
+Life is a language in which certain truths are conveyed to us; if we could learn them in some other way, we should not live.
+A man of business will often deceive you without the slightest scruple, but he will absolutely refuse to commit a theft.
+A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.
+The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.
+If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.
+Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.
+Apart from man, no being wonders at its own experience.
+What a person is for himself, what abides with him in his loneliness and isolation, and what no one can give or take away from him, this is obviously more essential for him than everything that he possesses or what he may be in the eyes of others.
+Consciousness is the mere surface of our minds, of which, as of the earth, we do not know the inside, but only the crust.
+Time is that in which all things pass away.
+Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see.
+Ist es an und fu? r sich absurd, das Nichtsein fu? r einUbel zu ? halten; da jedes Ubel wie jedes Gut das Dasein zur Voraussetzung hat, ja sogar das Bewusstsein. It is in and by itself absurd to regard non-existence as an evil; for every evil, like every good, presupposes existence, indeed even consciousness.
+The ultimate foundation of honor is the conviction that moral character is unalterable: a single bad action implies that future actions of the same kind will, under similar circumstances, also be bad.
+To be shocked at how deeply rejection hurts is to ignore what acceptance involves. We must never allow our suffering to be compounded by suggestions that there is something odd in suffering so deeply. There would be something amiss if we didn't.
+In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.
+A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
+To form a judgment intuitively is the privilege of few; authority and example lead the rest of the world. They see with the eyes of others, they hear with the ears of others. Therefore it is very easy to think as all the world now think; but to think as all the world will think thirty years hence is not in the power of every one.
+Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is. Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost.
+For an act to be moral the intention must be based on compassion, not duty. We do something because we want to do it, because we feel we have to do it, not because we ought to do it. And even if our efforts fail - or we never even get to implement them - we are still moral because our motivation was based on compassion.
+Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!
+In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.
+Pride is an established conviction of one�s own paramount worth in some particular respect, while vanity is the desire of rousing such a conviction in others, and it is generally accompanied by the secret hope of ultimately coming to the same conviction oneself. Pride works from within; it is the direct appreciation of oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appreciation indirectly, from without.
+There is no more mistaken path to happiness than worldliness, revelry, high life.
+If, while hurrying ostensibly to the temple of truth, we hand the reins over to our personal interests which look aside at very different guiding stars, for instance at the tastes and foibles of our contemporaries, at the established religion, but in particular at the hints and suggestions of those at the head of affairs, then how shall we ever reach the high, precipitous, bare rock whereon stands the temple of truth?
+Friends and acquaintances are the surest passport to fortune.
+If a man sets out to hate all the miserable creatures he meets, he will not have much energy left for anything else; whereas he can despise them, one and all, with the greatest ease.
+I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.
+Everything that happens, happens of necessity.
+Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small.
+I believe that when death closes our eyes we shall awaken to a light, of which our sunlight is but the shadow.
+Every nation criticizes every other one - and they are all correct.
+True brevity of expression consists in a man only saying what is worth saying, while avoiding all diffuse explanations of things which every one can think out for himself.
+If life � the craving for which is the very essence of our being � were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.
+What makes people hard-hearted is this, that each man has, or fancies he has, as much as he can bear in his own troubles.
+A good supply of resignation is of the first importance in providing for the journey of life.
+Console yourself by remembering that the world doesn't deserve your affection.
+To free a man from error is to give, not to take away. Knowledge that a thing is false is a truth. Error always does harm; sooner or later it will bring mischief to the man who harbors it.
+Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.
+To desire immortality for the individual is really the same as wanting to perpetuate an error forever.
+The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.
+Reason is feminine in nature; it can only give after it has received.
+Most men are so thoroughly subjective that nothing really interests them but themselves.
+One can forget everything, everything, only not oneself, one's own being.
+It takes place, by and large, with the same sort of necessity as a tree brings forth fruit, and demands of the world no more than a soil on which the individual can flourish.
+The truth can wait, for it lives a long life.
+The eternal being..., as it lives in us, also lives in every animal.
+It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.
+Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination.
+The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.
+Reason deserves to be called a prophet; for in showing us the consequence and effect of our actions in the present, does it not tell us what the future will be?
+Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.
+In order to increase his pleasures, man has intentionally added to the number and pressure of his needs, which in their original state were not much more difficult to satisfy than those of the brute. Hence luxury in all its forms; delicate food, the use of tobacco and opium, spirituous liquors, fine clothes, and the thousand and one things that he considers necessary to his existence.
+I love looking at famous people. Because of the way they look. Because of the way photography makes them look famous.
+Every child is in a way a genius; and every genius is in a way a child.
+Every new born being indeed comes fresh and blithe into the new existence, and enjoys it as a free gift: but there is, and can be, nothing freely given. It's fresh existence is paid for by the old age and death of a worn out existence which has perished, but which contained the indestructible seed out of which the new existence has arisen: they are one being.
+The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. . . Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value.
+Every hero is a Samson. The strong man succumbs to the intrigues of the weak and the many; and if in the end he loses all patience he crushes both them and himself.
+The scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic. Looked at close, they produce no effect. There is nothing beautiful to be found in them, unless you stand some distance off.
+Vengeance taken will often tear the heart and torment the conscience.
+No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.
+It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big.
+Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.
+Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is an abstract satisfaction of all.
+He who can see truly in the midst of general infatuation is like a man whose watch keeps good time, when all clocks in the town in which he lives are wrong. He alone knows the right time; what use is that to him?
+He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer's booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.
+With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.
+To call the world God is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym.
+If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much � and then performed so little.
+Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.
+The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.
+The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain� Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.
+A man of correct insight among those who are duped and deluded resembles one whose watch is right while all the clocks in the town give the wrong time.
+For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell but from this our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.
+Authors may be divided into falling stars, planets, and fixed stars: the first have a momentary effect; the second have a much longer duration; but the third are unchangeable, possess their own light, and work for all time.
+Every woman while she would be ready to die of shame if surprised in the act of generation, nonetheless carries her pregnancy without a trace of shame and indeed with a kind of pride. The reason is that pregnancy is in a certain sense a cancellation of the guilt incurred by coitus; thus coitus bears all the shame and disgrace of the affair, while pregnancy, which is so intimately associated with it, stays pure and innocent and is indeed to some extent sacred.
+All wanting comes from need, therefore from lack, therefore from suffering.
+A man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount, is, in the strict sense of the word, what is called a philistine.
+We must set limits to our wishes, curb our desires, moderate our anger, always remembering that an individual can attain only an infinitesimal share in anything that is worth having; and that on the other hand, everyone must incur many of the ills of life
+If a person is stupid, we excuse him by saying that he cannot help it; but if we attempted to excuse in precisely the same way the person who is bad, we should be laughed at.
+Happiness of any given life is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering-from positive evil.
+As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a place where only the literary palaeontologist regards them.
+Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
+To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.
+The beard, being a half-mask, should be forbidden by the police - It is, moreover, as a sexual symbol in the middle of the face, obscene: that is why it pleases women.
+Money is human happiness in the abstract.
+Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.
+Before you take anything away, you must have something better to put in its place.
+A man who has not enough originality to think out a new title for his book will be much less capable of giving it new contents.
+Virtue is as little to be acquired by learning as genius; nay, the idea is barren, and is only to be employed as an instrument, in the same way as genius in respect to art. It would be as foolish to expect that our moral and ethical systems would turn out virtuous, noble, and holy beings, as that our aesthetic systems would produce poets, painters, and musicians.
+Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.
+Sexual passion is the cause of war and the end of peace, the basis of what is serious... and consequently the concentration of all desire
+For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.
+The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey.
+[T]he appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, compagnon de miseres.
+It is not what things are objectively and in themselves, but what they are for us, in our way of looking at them, that makes us happy or the reverse.
+A man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with mast and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.
+A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.
+The common man is not concerned about the passage of time, the man of talent is driven by it.
+The man who sees two or three generations is like one who sits in the conjuror's booth at a fair, and sees the same tricks two or three times. They are meant to be seen only once.
+How entirely does the Upanishad breathe throughout the holy spirit of the Vedas! How is every one who by a diligent study of its Persian Latin has become familiar with that incomparable book stirred by that spirit to the very depth of his Soul !
+It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of Time and Space.
+Rascals are always sociable, more's the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others' company.
+Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every remeeting a foretaste of the resurrection. That is why even people who are indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they meet again after twenty or thirty years of separation.
+We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.
+Wir tappen im Labyrinth unsers Lebenswandels und im Dunkel unserer Forschungen umher: helleAugenblicke erleuchten dabei wie Blitze unsernWeg. We grope about in the labyrinth of our life and in the obscurity of our investigations; bright moments illuminate our path like flashes of lightning.
+Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts.
+All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.
+My body and my will are one.
+The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.
+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.
+Any book, which is at all important, should be reread immediately
+Life is neither to be wept over nor to be laughed at but to be understood.
+Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will. (One can choose what to do, but not what to want.)
+When a new truth enters the world, the first stage of reaction to it is ridicule, the second stage is violent opposition, and in the third stage, that truth comes to be regarded as self-evident.
+The ordinary method of education is to imprint ideas and opinions, in the strict sense of the word, prejudices, on the mind of the child, before it has had any but a very few particular observations. It is thus that he afterwards comes to view the world and gather experience through the medium of those ready-made ideas, rather than to let his ideas be formed for him out of his own experience of life, as they ought to be.
+Indeed, intolerance is essential only to monotheism; an only God is by nature a jealous God who will not allow another to live. On the other hand, polytheistic gods are naturally tolerant, they live and let live.
+One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.
+Many undoubtedly owe their good fortune to the circumstance that they possess a pleasing smile with which they win hearts. Yet these hearts would do better to beware and to learn from Hamlet's tables that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
+There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. The first kind have had thoughts or experiences which seem to
+them worth communicating, while the second kind need money and consequently write for money.
+Means at our disposal should be regarded as a bulwark against the many evils and misfortunes that can occur. We should not regard such wealth as a permission or even an obligation to procure for ourselves the pleasures of the world.
+Consciousness makes the individual careful to maintain his own existence; and if this were not so, there would be no surety for the preservation of the species. From all this it is clear that individuality is not a form of perfection, but rather a limitation; and so to be freed from it is not loss but gain.
+Music is the answer to the mystery of life. The most profound of all the arts, It expresses the deepest thoughts of life.
+Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
+There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?
+Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter.
+In the blessings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met.
+The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.
+It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else's meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.
+The less one, as a result of objective or subjective conditions, has to come into contact with people, the better off one is for it.
+Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.
+That arithmetic is the basest of all mental activities is proved by the fact that it is the only one that can be accomplished by a machine.
+There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
+Vedas are the most rewarding and the most elevating book which can be possible in the world.
+It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them.
+It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulse that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race.
+Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes; this is partly because it gets unobstructed hold of the hearer�s mind without his being distracted by secondary thoughts, and partly because he feels that here he is not being corrupted or deceived by the arts of rhetoric, but that the whole effect is got from the thing itself.
+Thus also every keen pleasure is an error and an illusion, for no attained wish can give lasting satisfaction.
+Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets you fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet.
+If people insist that honor is dearer than life itself, what they really mean is that existence and well-being are as nothing compared with other people's opinions. Of course, this may be only an exaggerated way of stating the prosaic truth that reputation, that is, the opinion others have of us, is indispensable if we are to make any progress in the world.
+Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well arranged, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and repeatedly thought over.
+Something of great importance now past is inferior to something of little importance now present, in that the latter is a reality, and related to the former as something to nothing.
+There is more to be learnt from every page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart, and Schleiermacher are taken together.
+Whether we are in a pleasant or a painful state depends, finally, upon the kind of matter that pervades and engrosses our consciousness and what we compare it to - better and we envious and sad, worse and we feel grateful and happy.
+Talent works for money and fame; the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine.
+To expect a man to retain everything that he has ever read is like expecting him to carry about in his body everything that he has ever eaten.
+If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man's property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity.
+It is only when a man is alone that he is really free.
+The principle of contradiction establishes merely the agreement of concepts, but does not itself produce concepts.
+Honor means that a man is not exceptional; fame, that he is.
+Faith is like love, it cannot be forced. Therefore it is a dangerous operation if an attempt be made to introduce or bind it by state regulations; for, as the attempt to force love begets hatred, so also to compel religious belief produces rank unbelief.
+Whatever folly men commit, be their shortcomings or their vices what they may, let us exercise forbearance; remember that when these faults appear in others it is our follies and vices that we behold.
+As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power. You can think about only what you know, so you ought to learn something; on the other hand, you can know only what you have thought about.
+Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.
+Honour is external conscience, and conscience is inward honour.
+There is a wide difference between the original thinker and the merely learned man.
+Alle Befriedigung, oder was man gemeinhin Glu� ck nennt, ist eigentlich und wesentlich immer nur negativ und durchaus nie positiv. All satisfaction, or what iscommonlycalled happiness, is really and essentially always negative only, and never positive.
+It is difficult, if not impossible, to define the limit of our reasonable desires in respect of possessions.
+Every state of welfare, every feeling of satisfaction, is negative in its character; that is to say, it consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of existence.
+The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.
+The happiness which we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings. . . . The world in which a person lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he or she looks at it.
+It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.
+What a man is: that is to say, personality, in the widest sense of the word; under which are included health, strength, beauty, temperament, moral character, intelligence, and education.
+Knowledge is to certain extent a second existence.
+The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.

Friedrich-Nietzsche.txt

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+There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them.
+Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.
+I was in darkness, but I took three steps and found myself in paradise. The first step was a good thought, the second, a good word; and the third, a good deed.
+There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.
+Nobody is more inferior than those who insist on being equal.
+And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
+To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.
+You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
+Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal.
+I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.
+All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
+Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
+No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
+Do you want to have an easy life? Then always stay with the herd and lose yourself in the herd.
+That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
+The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
+What is the difference between someone who is convinced and one who is deceived? None, if he is well deceived.
+The tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell.
+I know of no better life purpose than to perish in attempting the great and the impossible.
+In loneliness, the lonely one eats himself; in a crowd, the many eat him. Now choose.
+Everything matters. Nothing's important.
+Nobody can build the bridge for you to walk across the river of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would carry you across this river; but only at the cost of yourself; you would pawn yourself and lose. There is in the world only one way, on which nobody can go, except you: where does it lead? Do not ask, go along with it.
+Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
+If you know the why, you can live any how.
+Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.
+He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.
+Be careful who you choose as your enemy because that's who you become most like.
+Those who are devoid of purpose will make the void their purpose.
+The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.
+Man is the only animal that must be encouraged to live.
+The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.
+Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.
+There are no facts, only interpretations.
+you must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?
+It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
+One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power.
+Our greatest experiences are our quietest moments.
+Be careful when you cast out your demons that you don�t throw away the best of yourself.
+To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence.
+My solitude doesn�t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.
+Call me whatever you like; I am who I must be.
+They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.
+The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
+When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.
+Men who think deeply appear to be comedians in their dealings with others because they always have to feign superficiality in order to be understood.
+If the all powerful god controls satan he is an accomplice, and if he doesn't, he is not an all powerful god.
+The Great Man... is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of 'opinion'; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and 'respectability,' and altogether everything that is the 'virtue of the herd.' If he cannot lead, he goes alone... He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar... When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.
+Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?
+The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man.
+Solitude makes us tougher towards ourselves and tenderer towards others. In both ways it improves our character.
+One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.
+Only he who is man enough will release the woman in woman.
+Love your enemies because they bring out the best in you.
+Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.
+The real question is: How much truth can I stand?
+There's no defense against stupidity.
+I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.
+So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else's.
+Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.
+One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
+The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
+I and me are always too deeply in conversation.
+Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.
+The discipline of suffering, of great suffering- do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, preserving, interpreting, and exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness- was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?
+He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
+The 'kingdom of God' is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come 'in a thousand years' it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere.
+There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.
+Few are made for independence, it is the privilege of the strong.
+Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.
+There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
+We have art so that we shall not die of reality.
+And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally.
+There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.
+What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon.
+Do not allow yourselves to be deceived: Great Minds are Skeptical.
+You know a moment is important when it is making your mind go numb with beauty.
+I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
+Invisible threads are the strongest ties.
+The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.
+When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality.
+Loneliness is one thing, solitude another.
+The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.
+People who live in an age of corruption are witty and slanderous; they know that there are other kinds of murder than by dagger or assault; they also know that whatever is well said is believed.
+To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.
+For what purpose humanity is there should not even concern us: why you are here, that you should ask yourself: and if you have no ready answer, then set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them!
+He who obeys, does not listen to himself!
+All things that are truly great are at first thought impossible.
+One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.
+The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excluding them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success).
+The purpose of criminal law is to punish the enemies of those in power.
+In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.
+Life is the will to power; our natural desire to dominate and reshape the world to fit our own preferences and assert our personal strength to the fullest degree.
+In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.
+And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, ''I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did to yourself?
+Who is better, they who promote truth over happiness, or happiness over truth?
+Become who you are. Make what only you can make.
+I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule -- and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame, etc.)
+It is only when we have ceased to be the followers of our followers that we comprehend how meaningless followers are.
+All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
+When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.
+Amor Fati � �Love Your Fate�, which is in fact your life.
+Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can assume great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became �geniuses� (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.
+One must learn to love oneself with a wholesome and healthy love, so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam.
+No journey is too great,
+when one finds what one seeks.
+But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?
+Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.
+We are so fond of being out among nature, because it has no opinions about us.
+It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
+...lust is only a sweet poison for the weakling, but for those who will with a lion's heart it is the reverently reserved wine of wines.
+In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.
+In revenge and in love, woman is more barbarous than man.
+Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.
+What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure - as a mere automaton of duty?
+What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored.
+I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.
+Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
+We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.
+Every man has his price. This is not true. But for every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing. To win over certain people to something, it is only necessary to give it a gloss of love of humanity, nobility, gentleness, self-sacrifice - and there is nothing you cannot get them to swallow. To their souls, these are the icing, the tidbit; other kinds of souls have others.
+I am alone again and I want to be so; alone with the pure sky and open sea.
+The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.
+For this remains as I have already pointed out the essential difference between the two religions of decadence : Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils nothing.
+People are always angry at anyone who chooses very individual standards for his life; because of the extraordinary treatment which that man grants to himself, they feel degraded, like ordinary beings.
+But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeketh to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthward, downward, into the dark and deep � into the evil.
+When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold the inconvenience he causes us very much against him.
+Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.
+The great works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise.
+The deeper minds of all ages have had pity for animals.
+Without music, life would be a mistake.
+We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.
+When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
+Every profound spirit needs a mask.
+Mediocrity is the most effective mask a superior spirit can wear, because to the great majority, which is to say, to the mediocre,it will not suggest a disguise:--and yet it is precisely for their sake that he puts it on--so as not to arouse them, and, indeed, not infrequently to avoid this out of pity and benevolence.
+The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.
+All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down.
+By losing your goal, You have lost your way.
+What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.
+The 'kingdom of Heaven' is a condition of the heart - not something that comes 'upon the earth' or 'after death.'
+When self control is lacking in small things, the ability to apply it to matters of importance withers away. Every day in which one does not at least deny himself some trifle is badly spent and a threat to the day following.
+Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
+Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.Courageous, untroubled, mocking and violent-that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.
+Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.
+Become who you are!
+In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross.
+It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right --especially when one is right.
+What is wrong with Christianity is that it refrains from doing all those things that Christ commanded should be done.
+If you want me to believe in your redeemer, you are going to have to look a lot more redeemed.
+Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
+What is evil?-Whatever springs from weakness.
+There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.
+Socialism is the phantastic younger brother of despotism, which it wants to inherit. Socialism wants to have the fullness of state force which before only existed in despotism. ... However, it goes further than anything in the past because it aims at the formal destruction of the individual ... who ... can be used to improve communities by an expedient organ of government.
+Beware of spitting against the wind!
+No artist tolerates reality.
+Deep is the well of truth and long does it take to know what has fallen into its depths.
+But thus I counsel you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangmen and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had-power.
+One should steal only where one cannot rob.
+The lie is a condition of life.
+After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands.
+Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.
+One who is always deeply involved in what he is doing is above all embarrassment.
+What we do is never understood, but always merely praised or blamed.
+The strong individual loves the earth so much he lusts for recurrence. He can smile in the face of the most terrible thought: meaningless, aimless existence recurring eternally. The second characteristic of such a man is that he has the strength to recognize - and to live with the recognition - that the world is valueless in itself and that all values are human ones. He creates himself by fashioning his own values; he has the pride to live by the values he wills.
+Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty.
+Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further.
+I go in solitude, so as not to drink out of everybody's cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think I really think; after a time it always seems as if they want to banish myself from myself and rob me of my soul.
+To one who is accustomed to thinking a lot, every new thought that he hears or reads about immediately appears as a link in a chain.
+We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.
+Fear is the mother of morality.
+At the beginning of a marriage ask yourself whether this woman will be interesting to talk to from now until old age. Everything else in marriage is transitory: most of the time is spent in conversation.
+But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely.
+In a certain state it is indecent to live longer.
+A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
+The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
+Belief in truth begins with doubting all that has hitherto been believed to be true.
+What convinces is not necessarily true-it is merely convincing: a note for asses.
+the voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls
+To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both - a philosopher.
+One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people.
+Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
+There is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value. This absolute will to truth: what is it? Is it the will to not allow ourselves to be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive? One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived.
+Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
+A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.
+The best friend will probably acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is founded on the talent for friendship.
+My idea of paradise is a straight line to goal
+What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.
+Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, is the consequence of courage, of toughness towards oneself, of sincerity to oneself
+Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
+There is one thing one has to have either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge.
+Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.
+Everyone needs a sense of shame, but no one needs to feel ashamed.
+He has drawn back, only in order to have enough room for his leap
+On every parable you ride to every truth.
+Death is close enough at hand so we do not need to be afraid of life.
+The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, as instinct.
+Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.
+There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species.
+For a tree to become tall it must grow tough roots among the rocks.
+Creating-that is the great salvation from suffering.
+I love the great despisers because they are the great adorers.
+It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.
+The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
+The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill-temper.
+Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones but by extreme positions of the opposite kind.
+I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous � a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.
+Success has always been a great liar.
+Most people are too stupid to act in their own interest
+A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions.
+What is the seal of liberation? Not to be ashamed in front of oneself.
+The man who does not wish to be one of the mass only needs to cease to be easy on himself.
+"Belief in the truth commences with the doubting of all those "truths" we once believed."
+One man runs to his neighbor because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to loose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison for you.
+But he who is hated by the people, as the wolf by the dogs - is the free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-adorer, the dweller in the woods.
+The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.
+Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty.
+Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.
+It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong.
+A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.
+I am opposed to socialism because it dreams ingenuously of good, truth, beauty, and equal rights.
+Cows sometimes wear an expression resembling wonderment arrested on its way to becoming a question. In the eye of superior intelligence, on the other hand, lies the nil admirari spread out like the monotony of a cloudless sky.
+Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.
+Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself.
+Sit as little as possible. Give no credence to any thought that
+was not born outdoors while moving about freely.
+Morality is neither rational nor absolute nor natural. World has known many moral systems, each of which advances claims universality; all moral systems are therefore particular, serving a specific purpose for their propagators or creators, and enforcing a certain regime that disciplines human beings for social life by narrowing our perspectives and limiting our horizons.
+I hate who steals my solitude, without really offer me in exchange company.
+There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.
+A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.
+Untroubled, scornful, outrageous - that is how wisdom wants us to be: she is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior.
+Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it.
+I climb upon the highest mountains, laughing at all tragedies - whether real or imaginary.
+The man loves danger and sport. That is why he loves woman, the most dangerous of all sports.
+To have and to want more that is life.
+Original minds are not distinguished by being the first to see a new thing, but instead by seeing the old, familiar thing that is over-looked as something new.
+When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.
+Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.
+Our salvation lies not in knowing, but in creating!
+We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.
+Marriage was contrived for ordinary people, for people who are capable of neither great love nor great friendship, which is to say, for most people--but also for those exceptionally rare ones who are capable of love as well as of friendship.
+Every step forward is made at the cost of mental and physical pain to someone.
+... art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live.
+My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be other than it is, not in the future, not in the past, not in all eternity.
+You must climb above yourself-up and beyond, until you have even your stars under you.
+You lack the courage to be consumed in flames and to become ashes: so you will never become new, and never young again!
+Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.
+The more you let yourself go, the less others let you go.
+Every man has his price. This is not true. But for every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing.
+Whatever harm the evil may do, the harm done by the good is the most harmful harm.
+Profundity of thought belongs to youth, clarity of thought to old age.
+Even truthfulness is but one means to knowledge, a ladder--but not the ladder.
+Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?
+What makes us heroic?--Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.

Hegel.txt

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+Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two.
+We learn from history that we do not learn from history
+To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.
+Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.
+To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them.
+Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.
+What history teaches us is that neither nations nor governments ever learn anything from it.
+As high as mind stands above nature, so high does the state stand above physical life. Man must therefore venerate the state as a secular deity.
+The ignorant man is not free, because what confronts him is an alien world, something outside him and in the offing, on which he depends, without his having made this foreign world for himself and therefore without being at home in it by himself as in something his own. The impulse of curiosity, the pressure for knowledge, from the lowest level up to the highest rung of philosophical insight arises only from the struggle to cancel this situation of unfreedom and to make the world one's own in one's ideas and thought.
+God is, as it were, the sewer into which all contradictions flow.
+War is progress, peace is stagnation.
+I have the courage to be mistaken.
+If you want to love you must serve, if you want freedom you must die.
+Africa has no history and did not contribute to anything that mankind enjoyed.
+Every idea, extended into infinity, becomes its own opposite.
+The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures.
+Science and knowledge, especially that of philosophy, came from the Arabs into the West.
+Everything that from eternity has happened in heaven and earth, the life of God and all the deeds of time simply are the struggles for Spirit to know Itself, to find Itself, be for Itself, and finally unite itself to Itself; it is alienated and divided, but only so as to be able thus to find itself and return to Itself...As existing in an individual form, this liberation is called 'I'; as developed to its totality, it is free Spirit; as feeling, it is Love; and as enjoyment, it is Blessedness.
+The more certain our knowledge the less we know.
+In a true tragedy, both parties must be right.
+Before the end of Time will be the end of History. Before the end of History will be the end of Art.
+The force of mind is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as its power to expand and lose itself.
+Public opinion contains all kinds of falsity and truth, but it takes a great man to find the truth in it. The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and the essence of his age, he actualizes his age. The man who lacks sense enough to despise public opinion expressed in gossip will never do anything great.
+Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government.
+The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.
+Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself.
+The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
+An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.
+Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.
+Too fair to worship, too divine to love.
+Genuine tragedy is a case not of right against wrong but of right against right - two equally justified ethical principles embodied in people of unchangeable will.
+America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.
+Destiny is consciousness of oneself, but consciousness of oneself as an enemy.
+Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me
+The true is the whole.
+An individual piece only has meaning when it is seen as part of the whole.
+When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength.
+History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.
+A man who has work that suits him and a wife, whom he loves, has squared his accounts with life.
+The history of the world is none other than the progress of the , consciousness of freedom.
+Beauty is merely the Spiritual making itself known sensuously.
+Life has value only when it has something valuable as its object.
+No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.
+All education is the art of making men ethical (sittlich), of transforming the old Adam into the new Adam.
+Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.
+Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself. In each of these parts, however, the philosophical Idea is found in a particular specificality or medium. The single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through the limits imposed by its special medium, and gives rise to a wider circle. The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles. The Idea appears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the whole Idea is constituted by the system of these peculiar phases, and each is a necessary member of the organisation.
+The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony--periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.
+It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; . . . the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.
+To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.
+India has created a special momentum in world history as a country to be searched for knowledge.
+We must have a new mythology, but it must place itself at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Mythology must become philosophical, so that the people may become rational, and philosophy must become mythological, so that philosophers may become sensible. If we do not give ideas a form that is aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they will hold no interest for people.
+The spirit is never at rest, but always engaged in progressive motion, giving itself new form.
+Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer.
+God is the absolute truth...
+Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob.
+Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable
+We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
+Freedom is the fundamental character of the will, as weight is of matter... That which is free is the will. Will without freedom is an empty word.
+Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.
+The substance, the essence, the Spirit is freedom.
+The people are that part of the state that does not know what it wants.
+When we walk the streets at night in safety, it does not strike us that this might be otherwise. This habit of feeling safe has become second nature, and we do not reflect on just how this is due solely to the working of special institutions. Commonplace thinking often has the impression that force holds the state together, but in fact its only bond is the fundamental sense of order which everybody possesses.
+Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why.... The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar.
+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.
+World history is a court of judgment.
+Education to independence demands that young people should be accustomed early to consult their own sense of propriety and their own reason. To regard study as mere receptivity and memory work is to have a most incomplete view of what instruction means.
+Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.
+People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.
+Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.
+What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational
+The courage of the truth is the first condition of philosophic study.
+The sublime in art is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this representation.
+The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.
+The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself.
+What the English call "comfortable" is something endless and inexhaustible. Every condition of comfort reveals in turn its discomfort, and these discoveries go on for ever. Hence the new want is not so much a want of those who have it directly, but is created by those who hope to make profit from it.
+Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.
+Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized--the question involuntarily arises--to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.
+The proofs of the existence of God are to such an extent fallen into discredit that they pass for something antiquated, belonging to days gone by.
+The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant's existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom.
+The true courage of civilized nations is readiness for sacrifice in the service of the state, so that the individual counts as only one amongst many. The important thing here is not personal mettle but aligning oneself with the universal.
+For us, mind has nature for its premise, being nature's truth and for that reason its absolute prius. In this truth nature has vanished, and mind has resulted as the idea arrived at being-for-itself, the object of which, as well as the subject, is the concept. This identity is absolute negativity, for whereas in nature the concept has its perfect external objectivity, this its alienation has been superseded, and in this alienation the concept has become identical with itself. But it is this identity therefore, only in being a return out of nature.
+Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.
+All the worth which the human being possesses all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State... For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of History in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity...
+To him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back.
+There are Plebes in all classes.
+The state of man's mind, or the elementary phase of mind which he so far possesses, conforms precisely to the state of the world as he so far views it
+The heart-throb for the welfare of humanity therefore passes into the ravings of an insane self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and it does this by expelling from itself the perversion which it is itself, and by striving to look on it and express it as something else.
+Beauty and art pervade all the business of life like a kindly genius, brightly adorning our surroundings whether interior or exterior, mitigating the seriousness of existence and the complexities of the real life, extinguishing idleness in an entertaining fashion, and, where there is nothing good to be achieved, filling the place of vice better than vice itself.
+The Catholics had been in the position of oppressors, and the Protestants of the oppressed
+To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual.
+Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.
+It strikes everyone in beginning to form an acquaintance with the treasures of Indian literature that a land so rich in intellectual products and those of the profoundest order of thought.
+The people will learn to feel the dignity of man. They will not merely demand their rights, which have been trampled in the dust, but themselves will take them - make them their own.
+To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational whether in life or in science. Great achievement is assured, however, of subsequent recognition and grateful acceptance by public opinion, which in due course will make it one of its own prejudices
+The life of God - the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things - may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things.
+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.
+The heart is everywhere, and each part of the organism is only the specialized force of the heart itself.
+Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where, or rather which exists, and we can perfectly well say where, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty, ratiocination.
+It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.
+Children are potentially free and their life directly embodies nothing save potential freedom. Consequently they are not things and cannot be the property either of their parents or others.
+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.
+It is because the method of physics does not satisfy the comprehension that we have to go on further.
+Reason is just as cunning as she is powerful. Her cunning consists principally in her mediating activity, which, by causing objects to act and re-act on each other in accordance with their own nature, in this way, without any direct interference in the process, carries out reason's intentions.
+Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.
+Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.
+Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age, jump over Rhodes.
+Consequently, the sensuous aspect of art is related only to the two theoretical sensesof sight and hearing, while smell, taste, and touch remain excluded.
+Philosophy is the history of philosophy.
+It is a matter of perfect indifference where a thing originated; the only question is: Is it true in and for itself?
+Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.
+The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state. It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized.
+History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea is Space.
+Animals are in possession of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it.
+Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished without passion. It is only a dead, too often, indeed, a hypocriticalmoralizing which inveighs against the form of passion as such.
+The State is the Divine idea as it exists on Earth.
+If we go on to cast a look at the fate of these World-Historical persons, whose vocation it was to be the agents of the World-Spirit, we shall find it to have been no happy one. They attained no calm enjoyment; their whole life was labour and trouble; their whole nature was nought else but their master�passion. When their object is attained they fall off like empty hulls from the kernel. They die early, like Alexander; they are murdered, like Caesar.
+In the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world's culture delineated in faint outline.
+Everybody allows that to know any other science you must have first studied it, and that you can only claim to express a judgment upon it in virtue of such knowledge. Everybody allows that to make a shoe you must have learned and practised the craft of the shoemaker, though every man has a model in his own foot, and possesses in his hands the natural endowments for the operations required. For philosophy alone, it seems to be imagined, such study, care, and application are not in the least requisite
+Serious occupation is labor that has reference to some want.
+What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable.
+History as the slaughter-bench
+What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational. On this conviction the plain man like the philosopher takes his stand,and from it philosophy starts in its study of the universe of mind as well as the universe of nature.
+Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself.
+The real is the rational and the rational is the real.
+We assert then that nothing has been accomplished without interest on the part of the actors; and � if interest be called passion, inasmuch as the whole individuality, to the neglect of all other actual or possible interests and claims, is devoted to an object with every fibre of volition, concentrating all its desires and powers upon it � we may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.
+...if the fear of falling into error is the source of a mistrust in Science, which in the absence of any such misgivings gets on with the work itself and actually does know, it is difficult to see why, conversely, a mistrust should not be placed in this mistrust, and why we should not be concerned that this fear of erring is itself the very error.
+Philosophy must indeed recognize the possibility that the people rise to it, but must not lower itself to the people.
+In the Soul is the awaking of Consciousness: Consciousness sets itself up as Reason, awaking at one bound to the sense of its rationality: and this Reason by its activity emancipates itself to objectivity and the consciousness of its intelligent unity.
+The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many.
+The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State.

Immanuel-Kant.txt

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+If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.
+You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am
+Rules for Happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for.
+We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.
+Three things tell a man: his eyes, his friends and his favorite quotes
+Patience is the strength of the weak, impatience is the weakness of the strong.
+But a lie is a lie, and in itself intrinsically evil, whether it be told with good or bad intents.
+Do the right thing because it is right.
+Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
+The only thing permanent is change.
+Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.
+Most men use their knowledge only under guidance from others because they lack the courage to think independently using their own reasoning abilities. It takes intellectual daring to discover the truth.
+If we knew that god exists, such knowledge would make morality impossible. For, if we acted morally from fear or fright, or confident of a reward, then this would not be moral. It would be enlightened selfishness.
+He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
+We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
+Give a man everything he wants and at that moment everything is not everything
+Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.
+Look closely. The beautiful may be small.
+The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away.
+Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
+Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.
+Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.
+Honesty is better than any policy.
+It is never too late to become reasonable and wise.
+Do what is right, though the world may perish.
+The hand is the visible part of the brain.
+In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.
+The human heart refuses To believe in a universe Without a purpose.
+Great minds think for themselves.
+Always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end.
+I shall never forget my mother, for it was she who planted and nurtured the first seeds of good within me. She opened my heart to the lasting impressions of nature; she awakened my understanding and extended my horizon and her percepts exerted an everlasting influence upon the course of my life.
+Perpetual Peace is only found in the graveyard.
+Laziness and cowardice explain why so many men. . . remain under a life-long tutelage and why it is so easy for some men to set themselves up as the guardians of all the rest. . . If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a doctor who decides my diet, I need not trouble myself. If I am willing to pay, I need not think. Others will do it for me.
+All perception is colored by emotion.
+A single line in the Bible has consoled me more than all the books I ever read besides.
+Act in such a way that you will be worthy of being happy.
+THERE ARE TWO THINGS that don't have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter.
+Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence!
+Feminine traits are called weaknesses. People joke about them; fools ridicule them; but reasonable persons see very well that those traits are just the tools for the management of men, and for the use of men for female designs.
+Space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality.
+Heaven has given human beings three things to balance the odds of life: hope, sleep, and laughter.
+All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
+The two great dividers are religion and LANGUAGE
+Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.
+If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.
+The wise man can change his mind; the stubborn one, never.
+The question is not so much whether there is life on Mars as whether it will continue to be possible to live on Earth
+It is through good education that all the good in the world arises.
+Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty.
+Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
+If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.
+There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.
+I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.
+The greatest human quest is to know what one must do in order to become a human being.
+For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.
+Maturity is having the courage to use one's own intelligence!
+Happiness, though an indefinite concept, is the goal of all rational beings
+Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
+Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.
+Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.
+Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.
+Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
+One is not rich by what one owns, but more by what one is able to do without with dignity.
+Procrastination is hardly more evil than grasping impatience.
+Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites.
+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.
+Man's duty is to improve himself; to cultivate his mind; and, when he finds himself going astray, to bring the moral law to bear upon himself.
+All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.
+Thinking in pictures precedes thinking in words.
+Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.
+Always regard every man as an end in himself, and never use him merely as a means to your ends [i.e., respect that each person has a life and purpose that is their own; do not treat people as objects to be exploited].
+The nice thing about living in a small town is that when you don't know what you're doing, someone else does.
+The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.
+Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.
+Maximum individuality within maximum community
+When I could have used a wife, I could not support one; and when I could support one, I no longer needed any
+Two things strike me dumb: the infinite starry heavens, and the sense of right and wrong in man.
+One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.
+I am an investigator by inclination. I feel a great thirst for knowledge.
+No-one can compel me to be happy in accordance with his conception of the welfare of others, for each may seek his happiness in whatever way he sees fit, so long as he does not infringe upon the freedom of others to pursue a similar end which can be reconciled with the freedom of everyone else within a workable general law ? i.e. he must accord to others the same right as he enjoys himself.
+Life is the faculty of spontaneous activity, the awareness that we have powers.
+There is a limit where the intellect fails and breaks down, and this limit is where the questions concerning God and freewill and immortality arise.
+Reason can never prove the existence of God.
+The possession of power inevitably spoils the free use of reason.
+All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?
+Marriage...is the union of two people of different sexes with a view to the mutual possession of each other's sexual attributes for the duration of their lives.
+Suicide is not abominable because God prohibits it; God prohibits it because it is abominable.
+Melancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime.
+If I am to constrain you by any law, it must be one by which I am also bound.
+I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.
+Art is purposiveness without purpose.
+Freedom can never be comprehended, nor even can insight into it be gained.
+God, freedom, and immortality are untenable in the light of pure reason.
+By a lie, a man... annihilates his dignity as a man.
+After death the soul possesses self-consciousness, otherwise, it would be the subject of spiritual death, which has already been disproved. With this self-consciousness necessarily remains personality and the consciousness of personal identity.
+The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.
+Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.
+Religion is the recognition of all our duties as divine commands.
+Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.
+Riches ennoble a man's circumstances, but not himself.
+The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty.
+Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.
+Religion is too important a matter to its devotees to be a subject of ridicule. If they indulge in absurdities, they are to be pitied rather than ridiculed.
+Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me... Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
+A society that is not willing to demand a life of somebody who has taken somebody else�s life is simply immoral.
+One cannot avoid a certain feeling of disgust, when one observes the actions of man displayed on the great stage of the world. Wisdom is manifested by individuals here and there; but the web of human history as a whole appears to be woven from folly and childish vanity, often, too, from puerile wickedness and love of destruction: with the result that at the end one is puzzled to know what idea to form of our species which prides itself so much on its advantages.
+Enthusiasm is always connected with the senses, whatever be the object that excites it. The true strength of virtue is serenity of mind, combined with a deliberate and steadfast determination to execute her laws. That is the healthful condition of the moral life; on the other hand, enthusiasm, even when excited by representations of goodness, is a brilliant but feverish glow which leaves only exhaustion and languor behind.
+All our knowledge falls with the bounds of experience.
+Men will not understand ... that when they fulfil their duties to men, they fulfil thereby God's commandments; that they are consequently always in the service of God, as long as their actions are moral, and that it is absolutely impossible to serve God otherwise.
+Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.
+[A ruler is merely] the trustee of the rights of other men and he must always stand in dread of having in some way violated these rights.
+The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
+If we could see ourselves... as we really are, we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures, our community which neither began at birth nor will end with the death of the body.
+The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.
+Fallacious and misleading arguments are most easily detected if set out in correct syllogistic form.
+It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy
+Freedom is that faculty that enlarges the usefulness of all other faculties.
+Physicians think they do a lot for a patient when they give his disease a name.
+There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced.
+Beneficence is a duty.
+God put a secret art into the forces of Nature so as to enable it to fashion itself out of chaos into a perfect world system.
+Have the courage to use your own reason- That is the motto of enlightenment. "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" (1785)
+Human beings are never to be treated as a means but always as ends.
+Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
+Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.
+The sum total of all possible knowledge of God is not possible for a human being, not even through a true revelation. But it is one of the worthiest inquiries to see how far our reason can go in the knowledge of God.
+The ultimate destiny of the human race is the greatest moral perfection, provided that it is achieved through human freedom, whereby alone man is capable of the greatest happiness.
+Parents usually educate their children merely in such a manner than however bad the world may be, they may adapt themselves to its present conditions. But they ought to give them an education so much better than this, that a better condition of things may thereby be brought about by the future.
+Act so that the maxim of your act could be made the principle of a universal law.
+Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the mind; the first is the capacity of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations (spontaneity [in the production] of concepts).
+Arrogance is, as it were, a solicitation on the part of one seeking honor for followers, whom he thinks he is entitled to treat with contempt.
+In the mere concept of one thing it cannot be found any character of its existence.
+It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.
+It is often necessary to make a decision on the basis of knowledge sufficient for action but insufficient to satisfy the intellect.
+Philosophy stands in need of a science which shall determine the possibility, principles, and extent of human knowledge � priori.
+He who has made great moral progress ceases to pray
+Thrift is care and scruple in the spending of one's means. It is not a virtue and it requires neither skill nor talent.
+I learned to honor human beings, and I would find myself far more useless than the common laborer if I did not believe that this consideration could impart to all others a value establishing the rights of humanity.
+If a man is often the subject of conversation he soon becomes the subject of criticism.
+Duty is the necessity to act out of reverence for the law.
+Prudence approaches, conscience accuses.
+It is therefore correct to say that the senses do not err � not because they always judge rightly, but because they do not judge at all.
+Our intellect does not draw its laws from nature, but it imposes its laws upon nature.
+If an offender has committed murder, he must die. In this case, no possible substitute can satisfy justice. For there is no parallel between death and even the most miserable life, so that there is no equality of crime and retribution unless the perpetrator is judicially put to death.
+The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend � and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him.
+In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity.
+The existence of the Bible, as a book for the people, is the greatest benefit which the human race has ever experienced. Every attempt to belittle it is a crime against humanity.
+Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.
+Art does not want the representation of a beautiful thing, but the representation of something beautiful.
+Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know!
+The more we come in contact with animals and observe their behaviour, the more we love them, for we see how great is their care of the young.
+The only thing that is good without qualification is a good will.
+Better the whole people perish than that injustice be done
+Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!
+All natural capacities of a creature are destined to evolve completely to their natural end.
+Animals... are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man.
+Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, 'War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked men than it takes away.'
+Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.
+Human reason is by nature architectonic.
+Even a man's exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale.
+Law And Freedom without Violence (Anarchy) Law And Violence without Freedom (Despotism) Violence without Freedom And Law (Barbarism) Violence with Freedom And Law (Republic)
+I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.
+***Three Conditions of Happiness*** If you have work to do If you have someone you love If You have hope Then You are Happy now!
+[R]eason is... given to us as a practical faculty, that is, as one that influences the will.
+There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish.
+Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt
+Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal.
+Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.
+To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized - perhaps too much for our own good - in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as
+having reached morality - for that, much is lacking.
+With men, the state of nature is not a state of peace, but war.
+If it were possible for us to have so deep an insight into a man's character as shown both in inner and in outer actions, that every, even the least, incentive to these actions and all external occasions which affect them were so known to us that his future conduct could be predicted with as great a certainty as the occurrence of a solar or lunar eclipse, we could nevertheless still assert that the man is free.
+Among all nations, through the darkest polytheism glimmer some faint sparks of monotheism.
+Even the song of birds, which we can bring under no musical rule, seems to have more freedom, and therefore more for taste, than a song of a human being which is produced in accordance with all the rules of music; for we very much sooner weary of the latter, if it is repeated often and at length. Here, however, we probably confuse our participation in the mirth of a little creature that we love, with the beauty of its song; for if this were exactly imitated by man (as sometimes the notes of the nightingale are) it would seem to our ear quite devoid of taste.
+Beauty presents an indeterminate concept of Understanding, the sublime an indeterminate concept of Reason.
+Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.
+Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind... The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.
+Even if a civil society were to be dissolved by the consent of all its members (e.g., if a people inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse throughout the world), the last murderer remaining in prison would first have to be executed, so that each has done to him what his deeds deserve and blood guilt does not cling to the people for not having insisted upon this punishment; for otherwise the people can be regarded as collaborators in his public violation of justice.
+Laws always lose in energy what the government gains in extent.
+The business of philosophy is not to give rules, but to analyze the private judgments of common reason.
+Aristotle can be regarded as the father of logic. But his logic is too scholastic, full of subtleties, and fundamentally has not been of much value to the human understanding. It is a dialectic and an organon for the art of disputation.
+The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience
+This spirit of freedom is expanding even where it must struggle against the external obstacles of governments that misunderstand their own function. Such governments are illuminated by the example that the existence of freedom need not give cause for the least concern regarding public order and harmony in the commonwealth. If only they refrain from inventing artifices to keep themselves in it, men will gradually raise themselves from barbarism.
+Notion without intuition is empty, intuition without notion is blind.
+Is it reasonable to assume a purposiveness in all the parts of nature and to deny it to the whole?
+Moral Teleology supplies the deficiency in physical Teleology , and first establishes a Theology ; because the latter, if it did not borrow from the former without being observed, but were to proceed consistently, could only found a Demonology , which is incapable of any definite concept.
+Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end. - 'Metaphysical Principles of Virtue
+There is nothing higher than reason.
+Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.
+Apart from moral conduct, all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly.
+Reason should investigate its own parameters before declaring its omniscience.
+Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity.
+...as soon as we examine suicide from the standpoint of religion we immediately see it in its true light. We have been placed in this world under certain conditions and for specific purposes. But a suicide opposes the purpose of his creator; he arrives in the other world as one who has deserted his post; he must be looked upon as a rebel against God. God is our owner; we are his property; his providence works for our good.
+If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.
+It is by his activities and not by enjoyment that man feels he is alive. In idleness we not only feel that life is fleeting, but we also feel lifeless.
+Reason must approach nature with the view, indeed, of receiving information from it, not, however, in the character of a pupil, who listens to all that his master chooses to tell him, but in that of a judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose. To this single idea must the revolution be ascribed, by which, after groping in the dark for so many centuries, natural science was at length conducted into the path of certain progress.
+Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!
+Time is not an empirical concept. For neither co-existence nor succession would be perceived by us, if the representation of time did not exist as a foundation a priori.
+Nature even in chaos cannot proceed otherwise than regularly and according to order.
+The instruction of children should aim gradually to combine knowing and doing. Among all sciences mathematics seems to be the only one of a kind to satisfy this aim most completely.
+Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.
+Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.
+The existence of the Bible is the greatest blessing which humanity ever experienced.
+By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. A man who himself does not believe what he tells another ... has even less worth than if he were a mere thing. ... makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself.
+The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.
+We ourselves introduce that order and regularity in the appearance which we entitle "nature". We could never find them in appearances had we not ourselves, by the nature of our own mind, originally set them there.
+But only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows.
+The desire which a man has for a woman is not directed towards her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman ; that she is a human being is of no concern to the man; only her sex is the object of his desires.
+Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'
+Man desired concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; she desires discord. Man wants to live easy and content; but nature compels him to leave ease... and throw himself into roils and labors.
+It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.
+The function of the true state is to impose the minimum restrictions and safeguard the maximum liberties of the people, and it never regards the person as a thing.
+Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.
+Imagination is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.
+A man who has tasted with profound enjoyment the pleasure of agreeable society will eat with a greater appetite than he who rode horseback for two hours. An amusing lecture is as useful for health as the exercise of the body.
+Things which we see are not by themselves what we see ... It remains completely unknown to us what the objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them.
+All appearances are real and negatio; sophistical: All reality must be sensation.
+Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity...No thing is required for this enlightenment.. .except freedom; and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters.
+Christianity possesses the great advantage over Judaism of being represented as coming from the mouth of the first Teacher not as a statutory but as a moral religion, and as thus entering into the closest relation with reason so that, through reason, it was able of itself, without historical learning, to be spread at all times and among all peoples with the greatest trustworthiness.
+Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts ; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.
+The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.
+An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.
+Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastical, high-flown or exaggerated notion. It is a complement to the unwritten code of the civil and international law, necessary for the public rights of mankind in general and thus for the realization of perpetual peace.
+From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.
+Physicians think they are doing something for you by labeling what you have as a disease
+We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action.
+Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person's freedom.
+There is needed, no doubt, a body of servants (ministerium) of the invisible church, but not officials (officiales), in other words, teachers but not dignitaries, because in the rational religion of every individual there does not yet exist a church as a universal union (omnitudo collectiva).
+Every human being should always be treated as an end and never as a mere instrument.
+I assert that, in any particular natural science, one encounters genuine scientific substance only to the extent that mathematics is present.
+Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos.
+A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose.
+Reason must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he has himself formulated.
+But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.
+Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority... Supere aude! Dare to use your own understanding!is thus the motto of the Enlightenment.
+In all judgements by which we describe anything as beautiful, we allow no one to be of another opinion.
+Each according to his own way of seeing things, seek one goal, that is gratification.
+What are the aims which are at the same time duties? They are perfecting of ourselves, the happiness of others.
+Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.
+Freedom in the practical sense is the independence of the power of choice from necessitation by impulses of sensibility
+Beneficence is a duty; and he who frequently practices it, and sees his benevolent intentions realized comes, at length, really to love him to whom he has done good.
+The history of the human race, viewed as a whole, may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally, and for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.
+Standing armies shall in time be totally abolished.
+Reason in a creature is a faculty of widening the rules and purposes of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct; it acknowledges no limits to its projects. Reason itself does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another.
+Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
+Ghost stories are always listened to and well received in private, but pitilessly disavowed in public. For my own part, ignorant as I am of the way in which the human spirit enters the world and the way in which he goes out of it, I dare not deny the truth of many such narratives.
+. . . as to moral feeling, this supposed special sense, the appeal to it is indeed superficial when those who cannot think believe that feeling will help them out, even in what concerns general laws: and besides, feelings which naturally differ infinitely in degree cannot furnish a uniform standard of good and evil, nor has any one a right to form judgments for others by his own feelings. . . .
+Beneficence is a duty. He who frequently practices it, and sees his benevolent intentions realized, at length comes really to love him to whom he has done good. When, therefore, it is said, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," it is not meant, thou shalt love him first and do him good in consequence of that love, but, thou shalt do good to thy neighbor; and this thy beneficence will engender in thee that love to mankind which is the fulness and consummation of the inclination to do good.
+The infinitude of creation is great enough to make a world, or a Milky Way of worlds, look in comparison with it what a flower or an insect does in comparison with the Earth.
+An action is essentially good if the motive of the agent be good, regardless of the consequences.
+Sincerity is the indispensable ground of all conscientiousness, and by consequence of all heartfelt religion.
+Natural science physics contains in itself synthetical judgments a priori, as principles. ... Space then is a necessary representation a priori, which serves for the foundation of all external intuitions.
+Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected. The sacredness of religion, and the authority of legislation, are by many regarded as grounds for exemption from the examination by this tribunal, But, if they are exempted, and cannot lay claim to sincere respect, which reason accords only to that which has stood the test of a free and public examination.
+The sceptics, a kind of nomads, despising all settled culture of the land, broke up from time to time all civil society. Fortunately their number was small, and they could not prevent the old settlers from returning to cultivate the ground afresh, though without any fixed plan or agreement.
+Nature does nothing in vain, and in the use of means to her goals she is not prodigal. Her giving to man reason and the freedom of the will which depends upon it is clear indication of her purpose. Man accordingly was not to be guided by instinct, not nurtured and instructed with ready-made knowledge; rather, he should bring forth everything out of his own resources.
+The universal and lasting establishment of peace constitutes not merely a part, but the whole final purpose and end of the science of right as viewed within the limits of reason.
+[Aristotle formal logic thus far (1787)] has not been able to advance a single step, and hence is to all appearances closed and completed.
+We come no nearer the infinitude of the creative power of God, if we enclose the space of its revelation within a sphere described with the radius of the Milky Way, than if we were to limit it to a ball an inch in diameter. All that is finite, whatever has limits and a definite relation to unity, is equally far removed from the infinite... Eternity is not sufficient to embrace the manifestations of the Supreme Being, if it is not combined with the infinitude of space.
+It is presumed that there exists a great unity in nature, in respect of the adequacy of a single cause to account for many different kinds of consequences.
+Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.
+All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.
+In the metaphysical elements of aesthetics the various nonmoral feelings are to be made use of; in the elements of moral metaphysics the various moral feelings of men, according to the differences in sex, age, education, and government, of races and climates, are to be employed.
+[S]uppose the mind of [a] friend of humanity were clouded over with his own grief, extinguishing all sympathetic participation in the fate of others; he still has the resources to be beneficent to those suffering distress, but the distress of others does not touch him because he is sufficiently busy with his own; and now, where no inclination any longer stimulates him to it, he tears himself out of his deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination, solely from duty.
+This can never become popular, and, indeed, has no occasion to be so; for fine-spun arguments in favour of useful truths make just as little impression on the public mind as the equally subtle objections brought against these truths. On the other hand, since both inevitably force themselves on every man who rises to the height of speculation, it becomes the manifest duty of the schools to enter upon a thorough investigation of the rights of speculative reason, and thus to prevent the scandal which metaphysical controversies are sure, sooner or later, to cause even to the masses.
+What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?
+Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.
+All our knowledge begins with the senses...
+In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.
+How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.
+But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained, as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is [to be] avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination's freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination.
+There will always be some people who think for themselves, even among the self-appointed guardians of the great mass who, after having thrown off the yoke of immaturity themselves, will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable estimate of their own value and of the need for every man to think for himself.
+I am myself by inclination an investigator.
+Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity.
+For how is it possible, says that acute man, that when a concept is given me, I can go beyond it and connect with it another which is not contained in it, in such a manner as if that latter necessarily belonged to the former?
+Both love of mankind, and respect for their rights are duties; the former however is only a conditional, the latter an unconditional, purely imperative duty, which he must be perfectly certain not to have transgressed who would give himself up to the secret emotions arising from benevolence.
+Man's greatest concern is to know how he shall properly fill his place in the universe and correctly understand what he must be in order to be a man.
+It is the Land of Truth (enchanted name!), surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the true home of illusion, where many a fog bank and ice, that soon melts away, tempt us to believe in new lands, while constantly deceiving the adventurous mariner with vain hopes, and involving him in adventures which he can never leave, yet never bring to an end.
+In the natural state no concept of God can arise, and the false one which one makes for himself is harmful. Hence the theory of natural religion can be true only where there is no science; therefore it cannot bind all men together.
+Aus so krummen Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing can ever be made.
+Everything in nature acts in conformity with law.
+cruelty to animals is contrary to man's duty to himself, because it deadens in him the feeling of sympathy for their sufferings, and thus a natural tendency that is very useful to morality in relation to other human beings is weakened.
+When a thoughtful human being has overcome incentives to vice and is aware of having done his bitter duty, he finds himself in a state that could be called happiness, a state of contentment and peace of mind in which virtue is its own reward.
+If, like Hume, I had all manner of adornment in my power, I would still have reservations about using them. It is true that some readers will be scared off by dryness. But isn't it necessary to scare off some if in their case the matter would end up in bad hands?
+The ideal of the supreme being is nothing but a regulative principle of reason which directs us to look upon all connection in the world as if it originated from an all-sufficient necessary cause.
+I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.
+All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.
+All trades, arts, and handiworks have gained by division of labor... Where the different kinds of work are not distinguished and divided, where everyone is a jack-of-all-trades, there manufactures remain still in the greatest barbarism.
+No state at war with another state should engage in hostilities of such a kind as to render mutual confidence impossible when peace will have been made.
+Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence.
+Manners or etiquette ('accessibility, affability, politeness, refinement, propriety, courtesy, and ingratiating and captivating behavior') call for no large measure of moral determination and cannot, therefore, be reckoned as virtues. Even though manners are no virtues, they are a means of developing virtue.... The more we refine the crude elements in our nature, the more we improve our humanity and the more capable it grows of feeling the driving force of virtuous principles.
+We assume a common sense as the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our knowledge, which is presupposed in every logic and every principle of knowledge that is not one of skepticism.
+We find that the more a cultivated reason devotes itself to the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the further does man get away from true contentment.
+A lie is the abandonment and, as it were, the annihilation of the dignity by man.
+Ours is an age of criticism, to which everything must be subjected.
+The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.
+In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.
+The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.
+Deaths, births, and marriages, considering how much they are separately dependent on the freedom of the human will, should seem to be subject to no law according to which any calculation could be made beforehand of their amount; and yet the yearly registers of these events in great countries prove that they go on with as much conformity to the laws of nature as the oscillations of the weather.
+The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.
+Upon the solution of this problem, or upon sufficient proof of the impossibility of synthetical knowledge a priori, depends the existence or downfall of metaphysics.
+Man relates to material things through direct insight rather than reason.
+To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them, and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations. . . . For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination.
+I feel a complete thirst for knowledge and an eager unrest to go further in it as well as satisfaction at every acquisition. There was a time when I believed that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I had contempt for the ignorant rabble who know nothing.
+All appearances have a determinate magnitude (the relation of which to another assignable). The infinite does not appear as such, likewise not the simple. For the appearances are included between two boundaries (points) and are thus themselves determinate magnitudes.
+Prudence reproaches; conscience accuses.
+Why were a few, or a single one, made at all, if only to exist in order to be made eternally miserable, which is infinitely worse than non-existence?
+Innocence is indeed a glorious thing; but, unfortunately, it does not keep very well and is easily led astray.
+A science of all these possible kinds of space [the higher dimensional ones] would undoubtedly be the highest enterprise which a finite understanding could undertake in the field of geometry... If it is possible that there could be regions with other dimensions, it is very likely that God has somewhere brought them into being.
+The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men.
+Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.
+So act that anything you do may become universal law.
+An organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.
+It is difficult for the isolated individual to work himself out of the immaturity which has become almost natural for him.
+A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history according to a natural plan directed to achieving the civic union of the human race must be regarded as possible and, indeed, as contributing to this end of Nature.
+At some future day it will be proved, I cannot say when and where, that the human soul is, while in earth life, already in an uninterrupted communication with those living in another world.
+The inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in respect to what it has granted.
+Here I shall add that the concept of change, and with it the concept of motion, as change of place, is possible only through and in the representation of time. & Motion, for example, presupposes the perception of something movable. But space considered in itself contains nothing movable; consequently motion must be something which is found in space only through experience -in other words, is an empirical datum.
+The schematicism by which our understanding deals with the phenomenal world ... is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs.
+That Logic has advanced in this sure course, even from the earliest times, is apparent from the fact that, since Aristotle, it has been unable to advance a step, and thus to all appearance has reached its completion.
+Act so as to use humanity, yourself and others, always as an end and never as a means to an end.

Jean-Paul-Sartre.txt

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+We are our choices.
+What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence.
+Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.
+the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth
+Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.
+Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
+If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company.
+There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.
+Before you come alive, life is nothing; it 's up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose.
+Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.
+He who asks a question is a fool for a minute; he who does not remains a fool forever.
+When you realize that by changing your perspective, big things can be seen as little things, it becomes much harder to worry about anything. Commitment is an act, not a word.
+I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I
+am still choosing.
+Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
+We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.
+Because we can imagine, we are free.
+I hate victims who respect their executioners.
+I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity.
+It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.
+Sometimes the truth is too simple for intellectuals.
+Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.
+Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
+Life begins on the other side of despair.
+I have no religion, but if I were to choose one, it would be that of Shariati's.
+your judgement judges you and defines you
+Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. [It is a matter of choice, not chance.] Such is the first principle of existentialism.
+Commitment is an act, not a word.
+To know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.
+Words are loaded pistols.
+I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.
+God is dead. Let us not understand by this that he does not exist or even that he no longer exists. He is dead. He spoke to us and is silent. We no longer have anything but his cadaver. Perhaps he
+slipped out of the world, somewhere else like the soul of a dead man. Perhaps he was only a dream...God is dead.
+Nothingness haunts Being.
+The best work is not what is most difficult for you; it is what you do best.
+Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
+I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!
+I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.
+To choose not to choose is still to act.
+We make our own hell out of the people around us.
+Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.
+We do not judge the people we love.
+Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.
+Hell is other people at breakfast.
+What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world-and defines himself afterward.
+In wanting freedom we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends on ours. . . I am obliged to want others to have freedom at the same time that I want my own freedom. I can take freedom as my goal only if I take that of others as a goal as well.
+Death is a continuation of my life without me.
+If you seek authenticity for authenticity's sake you are no longer authentic.
+Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself.
+In love, one and one are one.
+Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
+Once freedom lights its beacon in man's heart, the gods are powerless against him.
+Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.
+There are two ways of destroying a people. Either condemn them en bloc or force them to repudiate the leaders they adopted. The second is the worse.
+In a word, man must create his own essence: it is in throwing himself into the world, suffering there, struggling there, that he gradually defines himself.
+Philosophy which does not help to illuminate the process of the liberation of the oppressed should be rejected.
+Once we know and are aware, we are responsible for our action and our inaction. We can do something about it or ignore it. Either way, we are still responsible.
+In life man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh to someone who has not made a success of his life. But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.
+Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
+I respect orders but I respect myself too and I do not obey foolish rules made especially to humiliate me.
+Why do you keep maintaining your ideas are right if you can't prove them?
+Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.
+I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.
+Introspection is always retrospection
+I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.
+What the painter adds to the canvas are the days of his life. The adventure of living, hurtling toward death.
+It is only in our decisions that we are important.
+I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.
+There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
+We are possessed by the things we possess. When I like an object, I always give it to someone. It isn't generosity-it's only because I want others to be enslaved by objects, not me.
+Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.
+I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.
+I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.
+Ideas come in pairs and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection.
+I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.
+We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.
+He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.
+To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.
+All I can do is make the best of what I am, become accustomed to it, evaluate the possibilities, and take advantage of them the best I can.
+What is boredom? It is when there is simultaneously too much and not enough.
+The individual's duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.
+Violence is good for those who have nothing to lose.
+I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.
+Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
+I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
+Man is what he wills himself to be.
+We must act out passion before we can feel it.
+There are two types of poor people, those who are poor together and those who are poor alone. The first are the true poor, the others are rich people out of luck.
+The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.
+I want to leave, to go somewhere where I should be really in my place, where I would fit in . . . but my place is nowhere; I am unwanted.
+As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
+Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.
+Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
+The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question.
+He loves me, he doesn't love my bowels, if they showed him my appendix in a glass he wouldn't recognize it, he's always feeling me, but if they put the glass in his hands he wouldn't touch it, he wouldn't think, "that's hers," you ought to love all of somebody, the esophagus, the liver, the intestines. Maybe we don't love them because we aren't used to them, but if we saw them the way we saw our hands and arms maybe we'd love them; the starfish must love each other better than we do.
+I will not be modest. Humble, as much as you like, but not modest. Modesty is the virtue of the lukewarm.
+When she is alone in the rooms I hear her humming to keep herself from thinking.
+A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.
+God is absence. God is the solitude of man.
+He walked on in silence, the solitary sound of his footsteps echoing in his head, as in a deserted street, at dawn. His solitude was so complete, beneath a lovely sky as mellow and serene as a good conscience, amid that busy throng, that he was amazed at his own existence; he must be somebody else's nightmare, and whoever it was would certainly awaken soon.
+In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.
+If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed. The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner.
+Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.
+Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.
+I confused things with their names: that is belief.
+I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.
+I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.
+Everything comes to us from others. To Be is to belong to someone.
+I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.
+My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think� and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.
+It is disgusting -- Why must we have bodies?
+A kiss without a moustache, they said then, is like an egg without salt; I will add to it: and it is like Good without Evil.
+Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.
+What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.
+If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I'm still waiting, it's all been to seduce women basically.
+It is meaningless that we are born, it is meaningless that we die.
+I do not think therefore I am a moustache
+Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.
+Several hours or several years make no difference once you have lost eternity.
+She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist.
+When we love animals and children too much, we love them at the expense of men.
+The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions � and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the �divine irresponsibility� of the condemned man.
+The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.
+It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.
+Every human endeavor, however singular it seems, involves the whole human race.
+When the rich [and politically powerful] make war, it's the poor [and politically weak] who die.
+How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?
+When rich people fight wars with one another, poor people are the ones to die.
+Uncalled-for aggression arouses the hatred of the civilian population.
+Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.
+Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
+It�s the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don�t say a word, they don�t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly.
+We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and mute as stones, our very passivity would be an act.
+That�s what existence means: draining one�s own self dry without the sense of thirst.
+I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.
+There is no salvation anywhere. The idea of salvation implies the idea of an absolute.
+Life gave me everything I asked
+If all I asked was not a great deal, that's my problem!
+People who live in society have learnt how to see themselves, in mirrors, as they appear to their friends. I have no friends: is that why my flesh is so naked?
+One of the chief motives of artistic creation is certainly the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship to the world.
+Il n'y a de r�alit� que dans l'action. (There is no reality except in action.)
+Man is condemned to be free
+No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.
+We are now in a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world of everything except the Jews.
+A madman's ravings are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.
+There are two kinds of existentialist; first, those who are Christian...and on the other hand the atheistic existentialists, among whom...I class myself. What they have in common is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the turning point.
+[M]an is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, in other respect is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. The Existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a man to certain acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion.
+Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.
+You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.
+The viable jewels of life remain untouched when man forgets his vocation of searching for the truth of his existence.
+Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself.
+Man must be invented each day
+Photographs are not ideas. They give us ideas.
+If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything.
+I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day. Today it seemed to want to change. And then anything, anything could happen.
+Naturally, in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason or another, but at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical enough.
+Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.
+I am responsible for everything... except my very responsibility.
+Two people can form a community by excluding a third.
+The coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic.
+Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.
+I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are honest hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I sense so definitely that they come from me, and that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge. Not a glimmer comes from Rollebon's side. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigour of the order I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination.
+I had realized in the meantime that action too has its difficulties, and that one can also be led to it by neurosis. We are not saved by politics any more than by literature.
+Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.
+One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.
+Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
+Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.
+The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the consciousness that thinks.
+There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.
+I committed the first crime by creating men as mortals. After that, what more could you do, you the murderers? Come on; they already had death in them: at most you simply hastened things a little.
+One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.
+What is not possible is not to choose.
+I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.
+Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn't let itself be extended it achieves significance only through its death.
+It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns...It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I.
+[Lost of the absolute] is in this sense that ''I no longer know what to do with my life" must be understood. Critics have been mistaken about the meaning of this phrase, seeing in it a cry of despair as in Simone de Beauvoir's "I have been cheated." When she uses this word it is to indicate that she claims from life an absolute which she cannot find there.
+You are -- your life, and nothing else.
+I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough.
+There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror. And then, next day, you didn't know what to make of it,you couldn't interpret the horror you had glimpsed the day before. Yes, you know what evil costs.
+To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June
+When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness.
+It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.
+I wanted pure love: foolishness; to love one another is to hate a common enemy: I will thus espouse your hatred. I wanted Good: nonsense; on this earth and in these times, Good and Bad are inseparable: I accept to be evil in order to become good.
+You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.
+As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.
+And I too wanted to be. That is all I wanted; and this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bounds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note. That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world.
+Handing over a bank note is enough to make a bicycle belong to me, but my entire life is needed to realize this possession.
+Because the Nazi venom worked its way even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest; because an all-powerful police sought to force us into silence every word became as precious as a declaration of principle; because we were persecuted, each of our gestures carried the weight of a commitment.
+A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form.
+As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. ... I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.
+One can ask why the I has to appear in the cogito {Descartes� argument �I think therefore I am.}, since the cogito, if used rightly, is the awareness of pure consciousness, not directed at any fact or action. In fact the I is not necessary here, since it is never united directly to consciousness. One can even imagine a pure and self-aware consciousness which thinks of itself as impersonal spontaneity.
+When one does nothing, one believes oneself responsible for everything.
+I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.
+One should commit no stupidity twice, the variety of choice is, in the end, large enough.
+I think there is an enormous diference between speaking and writing. One rereads what one writes. But one might read it slowly or quickly. In other words, you do not know how long you will have to spend deliberating over a sentence. ... But if I listen to a tape recorder, the listening time is determined by the speed at which the tape turns and not by my own needs.
+Man is the being whose project it is to be God.
+Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.
+To keep hope alive one must, in spite of all mistakes, horrors, and crimes, recognize the obvious superiority of the socialist camp.
+All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
+One does not adopt a new idea, one slips into it.
+I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.
+A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.
+What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?
+Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.
+This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.
+I have such a desire to sleep and am so much behind my sleep. A good night, one good night and all this nonsense will be swept away.
+For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it.
+Let it crumble! Let the rocks revile me and flowers wilt at my coming. Your whole universe is not enough to prove me wrong. You are the king of gods, king of stones and stars, king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of man.
+Atheism is a cruel long term business, and I have gone through it to the end.
+Acting is happy agony.
+There are photographers who push for war because they make stories. They search for a Chinese who has a more Chinese are than the others and they end up finding one. They have him take a typically Chinese pose and surround him with chinoiseries. What have they captured on their film? A Chinese? Definitely not: the idea of the Chinese.
+A Soviet citizen, an official writer, once said to me: "The day when Communism (that is, well-being for everyone) reigns, man's tragedy will begin: his finitude."
+I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have dragged through I don't know how many consciences.
+But [your crime] will be there, one hundred times denied, always there, dragging itself behind you. Then you will finally know that you have committed your life with one throw of the die, once and for all, and there is nothing you can do but tug our crime along until your death. Such is the law, just and unjust, of repentance. Then we will see what will become of your young pride.
+It answers the question that was tormenting you: my love, you are not 'one thing in my life' - not even the most important - because my life no longer belongs to me because...you are always me.
+We will not go to Heaven,Goetz, and even if we both entered it, we would not have eyes to see each other, nor hands to touch each other. Up there, God gets all the attention.... We can only love on this earth and against God.
+It is no longer possible to escape men. Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints. Farewell to pride. All that is left is men.
+That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
+This desire [to write] is rather strange all the same and is not without a certain "cracked" quality.
+For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexibleorder gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves.... I would like to hole them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stooping one, there would only remain in may hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions.
+Yes, I am so free. And what a superb absence is my soul.
+So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.
+Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.
+When I can't see myself in the mirror, I can't even feel myself, and I begin to wonder if I exist at all.
+It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.
+With despair, true optimism begins: the optimism of the man who expects nothing, who knows he has no rights and nothing coming to him, who rejoices in counting on himself alone and in acting alone for the good of all.
+So much torture, bloodshed, deceit. You cannot make your young people practice torture twenty-four hours a day and not expect to pay a price for it.
+What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness.
+Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.
+What I ask of [the writer] is not to ignore the reality and the fundamental problems that exist. The world's hunger, the atomic threat, the alienation of man, I am astonished that they do not color all our literature.
+You take souls for vegetables.... The gardener can decide what will become of his carrots but no one can choose the good of others for them.
+Take [St�phane] Mallarme. I hold him to be the greatest of French poets, and I have taken some time to understand him !
+Man is abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no aim but what he sets himself.
+Don't you feel the same way? When I cannot see myself, even though I touch myself, I wonder if I really exist.
+I discovered suddenly that alienation, exploitation of man by man, under-nourishment, relegated to the background metaphysical evil which is a luxury.
+Nicias, do you think you can erase with good deeds the wrongs you committed against your mother? What good deed will ever reach her? Her soul is a scorching noon time, without a single breath of a breeze, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing lives there; a great emaciated sun, an immobile sun eternally consumes her.
+I construct my memories with my present. I am lost, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.
+The characteristic of every neurosis is to represent itself as natural.
+To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being
+good for all.
+I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.
+It is always more valuable to report the truth.
+There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left; he will say to himself, "now what?
+Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.
+Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.
+To think new thoughts you have to break the bones in your head
+I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.
+Like morality, literature needs to be universal. So that the writer must put himself on the side of the majority, of the two billion starving, if he wishes to be able to speak to all and be read by all. Failing that, he is at the service of a privileged class and, like it, an exploiter.
+We will freedom for freedom�s sake, in and through particular circumstances. And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own. Obviously, freedom as the definition of a man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as my own. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.
+Philosophy appears to some people as a homogenous milieu: there thoughts are born and die, there systems are built, and there, in turn, they collapse. Others take Philosophy for a specific attitude which we can freely adopt at will. Still others see it as a determined segment of culture. In our view Philosophy does not exist.
+The universe remains dark. We are animals struck by catastrophe.
+Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident
+Is there really nothing, nothing left of me?
+You know how much I admire Che Guevara. In fact, I believe that the man was not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age: as a fighter and as a man, as a
+theoretician who was able to further the cause of revolution by drawing his theories from his personal experience in battle.
+I needed to justify my existence, and I had made an absolute of literature. It took me thirty years to get rid of this state of mind.
+I exist. It's sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you'd think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently. There is bubbling water in my mouth. I swallow. It slides down my throat, it caresses me � and now it comes up again into my mouth. For ever I shall have a little pool of whitish water in my mouth - lying low - grazing my tongue. And this pool is still me. And the tongue. And the throat is me.
+I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.
+If I relegate impossible Salvation to the prop room, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any.
+I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where ? To this very moment.
+The more absurd life is, the more insupportable death is.
+Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.
+In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one's life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence
+� as not-bound to life.
+I do not understand! I understand nothing! I cannot understand nor do I want to understand! I want to believe! To Believe!
+Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.
+I am myself and I am here.
+What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.
+One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.
+My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.
+A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.
+An individual chooses and makes himself.
+Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.
+I am finishing a biography of [Gustave] Flaubert. Because he is the opposite of what I am. One needs to rub up against argument.
+Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.
+This is the basis for the joy of love when there is joy; we feel that our existence is justified.
+The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man.
+What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it.
+There it is: I am gently slipping into the water's depths, towards fear.
+If I did not publish this autobiography [Les Mots] sooner and in its most radical form, it is because I considered it exaggerated.
+The plight of modern man is that he is condemmed to be free.
+Time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.
+All I want is' - and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame - 'to retain my freedom.' I should myself have thought,' said Jacques, 'that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one's responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view.
+The lad who dreams of being a boxing champion or an admiral chooses reality. If the writer chooses the imaginary, he confuses the two.
+Everything is gratuitous, this garden, this city and myself. When you suddenly realize it, it makes you feel sick and everything begins to drift . . . that's nausea.
+Absurd, irreducible; nothing � not even a profound and secret delirium of nature � could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.
+The sun is not ridiculous, quite the contrary. On everything I like, on the rust of the construction girders, on the rotten boards of the fence, a miserly, uncertain light falls, like the look you give, after a sleepless night, on decisions made with enthusiasm the day before, on pages you have written in one spurt without crossing out a word.
+As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.
+I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.
+If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.
+I am not recommending "popular" literature which aims at the lowest.
+Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait.
+If you begin by saying, 'Thou shalt not lie,' there is no longer any possibility of political action.
+If a Jew is fascinated by Christians it is not because of their virtues, which he values little, but because they represent anonymity, humanity without race.
+For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.
+The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.
+it was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else.
+When one loves animals and children too much, one loves them against human beings.
+Un homme n'est rien d'autre qu'une se rie d'entreprises. A man is no other than a series of undertakings.
+Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence.
+L'homme est condamne a' e" tre libre. Man is condemned to be free.
+Your scare me rather. My reflection in the glass never did that; of course, I knew it so well. Like something I had tamed...I'm going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and heaven knows what it will become.
+The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose, not his individuality, but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.
+For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.
+A writer who takes political, social or literary positions must act only with the means that are his. These means are the written words.
+I have seen children dying of hunger. Over against a dying child La Nausee cannot act as a counterweight.
+That is exactly the writer's problem. What does literature stand for in a hungry world?
+On my way to the office in the morning, there are, in front of me, behind me, other men going to their jobs. I see them; if I dared, I would smile at them. I think to myself that I am a socialist, that they are the purpose of my life, of my efforts and that they do not know it yet.
+Respectable society believed in God in order to avoid having to speak about him.
+She suffers as a miser. She must be miserly with her pleasures, as well. I wonder if sometimes she doesn't wish she were free of this monotonous sorrow, of these mutterings which start as soon as she stops singing, if she doesn't wish to suffer once and for all, to drown herself in despair. In any case, it would be impossible for her: she is bound.
+Men equally honest, equally devoted to their fatherland, are momentarily separated by different conceptions of their duty.
+Existence is an imperfection.
+Torture is senseless violence, born in fear... torture costs human lives but does not save them. We would almost be too lucky if these crimes were the work of savages: the truth is that torture makes torturers.
+I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.
+There is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving.
+He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.
+Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.
+It is better; heavier, crueler. The mouth you wear for hell.
+Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?
+So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral.
+Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.
+I maintain that inversion is the effect of neither a prenatal choice nor an endocrinal malformation nor even the passive and determined result of complexes. It is an outlet that a child discovers when he is suffocating.
+To whomever gives a kiss or a blow
+Render a kiss or blow
+But to whomever gives when you are unable to return
+Offer all the hatred in your heart
+For you were slaves and he enslaves you
+Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.
+It is enough that one man hate another for hate to gain, little by little, all mankind.

Plato.txt

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+If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.
+No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.
+Reality is created by the mind, we can change our reality by changing our mind.
+A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool because he has to say something.
+Be kind. Every person you meet
+is fighting a difficult battle.
+Better to complete a small task well, than to do much imperfectly.
+The right question is usually more important than the right answer.
+Ignorance is the root cause of all difficulties.
+Someday, in the distant future, our grand-children' s grand-children will develop a new equivalent of our classrooms. They will spend many hours in front of boxes with fires glowing within. May they have the wisdom to know the difference between light and knowledge.
+Don't force your children into your ways, for they were created for a time different from your own.
+I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.
+Perfect wisdom has four parts: Wisdom, the principle of doing things aright. Justice, the principle of doing things equally in public and private. Fortitude, the principle of not fleeing danger, but meeting it. Temperance, the principle of subduing desires and living moderately.
+Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
+The one who learns and learns and doesn't practice is like the one who plows and plows and never plants.
+The first and the best victory is to conquer self.
+To begin is the most important part of any quest and by far the most courageous.
+If one has made a mistake, and fails to correct it, one has made a greater mistake.
+Education in music is most sovereign because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the innermost soul and take strongest hold upon it
+Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood let alone believed by the masses.
+The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
+The measure of a man is what he does with power.
+Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.
+Wisest is he who knows what he does not know.
+Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead. Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.
+Those who tell the stories rule society.
+The worst of all deceptions is self-deception.
+You should not honor men more than truth.
+The greatest wealth is to live content with little.
+Integrity is your destiny-it is the light that guides your way.
+Welcome out of the cave, my friend. It's a bit colder out here, but the stars are just beautiful.
+One cannot make a slave of a free person, for a free person is free even in a prison.
+False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
+There is nothing so delightful as the hearing, or the speaking of truth. For this reason, there is no conversation so agreeable as that of the man of integrity, who hears without any intention to betray, and speaks without any intention to deceive.
+Poverty doesn't come because of the decrease of wealth but because of the increase of desires.
+Never discourage anyone who continually makes progress, no matter how slow... even if that someone is yourself!
+Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back.
+A true artist is someone who gives birth to a new reality.
+The souls of people, on their way to Earth-life, pass through a room full of lights; each takes a taper - often only a spark - to guide it in the dim country of this world. But some souls, by rare fortune, are detained longer - have time to grasp a handful of tapers, which they weave into a torch. These are the torch-bearers of humanity - its poets, seers and saints, who lead and lift the race out of darkness, toward the light. They are the law-givers and saviors, the light-bringers, way-showers and truth-tellers, and without them, humanity would lose its way in the dark.
+Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.
+We become what we contemplate.
+He who does not desire power is fit to hold it.
+The three wishes of every man: to be healthy, to be rich by honest means, and to be beautiful.
+Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds.
+How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?
+The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge.
+The greatest mistake physicians make is that they attempt to cure the body without attempting to cure the mind, yet the mind and the body are one and should not be treated separately!
+He who is only an athlete is too crude, too vulgar, too much a savage. He who is a scholar only is too soft, to effeminate. The ideal citizen is the scholar athlete, the man of thought and the man of action.
+I know not how I may seem to others, but to myself I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to content myself with
+He who love touches walks not in darkness.
+Pleasure is the bait of sin
+A good decision is based on knowledge, and not on numbers.
+The cure of the part should not be attempted without treatment of the whole. No attempt should be made to cure the body without the soul. Let no one persuade you to cure the head until he has first given you his soul to be cured, for this is the great error of our day, that physicians first separate the soul from the body.
+When man is not properly trained, he is the most savage animal on the face of the globe.
+Happiness springs from doing good and helping others.
+One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
+The blame is his who chooses: God is blameless.
+Harmony sinks deep into the recesses of the soul and takes its strongest hold there, bringing grace also to the body & mind as well. Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, and life to everything. It is the essence of order.
+Do not expect justice where might is right.
+When you feel grateful, you become great, and eventually attract great things.
+If we are to have any hope for the future, those who have lanterns must pass them on to others.
+We see many instances of cities going down like sinking ships to their destruction. There have been such wrecks in the past and there surely will be others in the future, caused by the wickedness of captains and crews alike. For these are guilty men, whose sin is supreme ignorance of what matters most.
+Mankind will never see an end of trouble until lovers of wisdom come to hold political power, or the holders of power become lovers of wisdom
+Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.
+A library of wisdom, is more precious than all wealth, and all things that are desirable cannot be compared to it. Whoever therefore claims to be zealous of truth, of happiness, of wisdom or knowledge, must become a lover of books.
+If the head and the body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul.
+A dog has the soul of a philosopher.
+Thinking is the soul talking to itself.
+The greatest privilege of a human life is to become a
+midwife to the awakening of the Soul in another person.
+All wars are fought for the sake of getting money.
+No one is a friend to his friend who does not love in return.

Sigmund-Freud.txt

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+In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.
+Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
+One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
+We choose not randomly each other. We meet only those who already exists in our subconscious.
+Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
+Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.
+Words have a magical power. They can either bring the greatest happiness or the deepest despair.
+Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worst, returned. But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.
+We are what we are because we have been what we have been.
+The sexual life of adult women is a "dark continent" for psychology.
+Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.
+All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.
+Love is a state of temporary psychosis.
+The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'
+Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.
+I have found little 'good' about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash.
+A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.
+Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.
+The only shame in masturbation is the shame of not doing it well.
+The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.
+History is just new people making old mistakes.
+From error to error one discovers the entire truth.
+Maturity is the ability to postpone gratification.
+The only person with whom you have to compare ourselves, is that you in the past. And the only per-son better you should be, this is who you are now.
+The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
+Love in the form of longing and deprivation lowers the self regard.
+If you want your wife to listen to you, then talk to another woman; she will be all ears.
+Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they do not love.
+Two hallmarks of a healthy life are the abilities to love and to work. Each requires imagination.
+Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.
+Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.
+A man's heterosexuality will not put up with any homosexuality, and vice versa.
+Were we fully to understand the reasons for other people's behavior, it would all make sense.
+I became aware of my destiny: to belong to the critical minority as opposed to the unquestioning majority.
+When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has.
+Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question."
+There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal.
+The unconscious of one human being can react upon that of another without passing through the conscious.
+I prefer the company of animals more than the company of humans. Certainly, a wild animal is cruel. But to be merciless is the privilege of civilized humans.
+When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.
+To be completely honest with oneself is the very best effort a human being can make.
+Without love we fall ill.
+Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.
+When someone abuses me I can defend myself, but against praise I am defenceless.
+Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?
+Time spent with cats is never wasted.
+Not all men are worthy of love.
+Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
+Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.
+The meager satisfaction that man can extract from reality leaves him starving.
+It is not attention that the child is seeking, but love.
+The only unnatural sexual behavior is none at all.
+That which we can't remember, we will repeat.
+Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.
+A woman should soften but not weaken a man.
+Crystals reveal their hidden structures only when broken.
+Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.
+When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.
+Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.
+One must learn to give up momentary, uncertain and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but dependable pleasure.
+The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.
+Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.
+Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
+Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
+How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.
+Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.
+Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being only the products of the psychic activity of man.
+A father's death is the most important event, the more heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man's life.
+If it's not one thing, it's your mother.
+The paranoid is never entirely mistaken.
+The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.
+Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.
+When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves
+Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.
+The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever... because they already live in a dream world.
+None believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.
+The madman is a dreamer awake
+Humanity is in the highest degree irrational, so that there is no prospect of influencing it by reasonable arguments. Against prejudice one can do nothing.
+Our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to experience. We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.
+All giving is asking, and all asking is an asking for love.
+In the depths of my heart I can�t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.
+I've been a fortunate man in life, nothing has come easily.
+The news that reaches your consciousness is incomplete and often not to be relied on.... Turn your eyes inward, look into your own depths, learn first to know yourself!
+America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.
+It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement -- that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.
+Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love.
+My boy! Smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, i can only feel sorry for you.
+Humor is a means of obtaining pleasure in spite of the distressing effects that interface with it.
+Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.
+All that matters is love and work.
+The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.
+Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.
+The goal of all life is death
+We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.
+The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.
+I had the greatest respect for the authorities of my day--until I studied things for myself, and came to my own conclusions.
+The inclination to aggression constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization.
+In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension that is, with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure.
+My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.
+Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.
+The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.
+A strong egoism is a protection.
+We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.
+Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.
+Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.
+The behavior of a human being in sexual matters is often a prototype for the whole of his other modes of reaction in life.
+Sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general. No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.
+America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
+If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.
+Intolerance of groups is often, strangely enough, exhibited more strongly against small differences than against fundamental ones.
+Perhaps the gods are kind to us, by making life more disagreeable as we grow older. In the end death seems less intolerable than the manifold burdens we carry
+Men are strong so long as they represent a strong idea they become powerless when they oppose it.
+Love and work, work and love...that's all there is.
+Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love.
+If you can't do it, give up!
+Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.
+Indeed, the great Leonardo (da Vinci) remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one way. It is said that all great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries.
+Dreams are constructed from the residue of yesterday.
+Perception is less of a recording system and more of a protection system against external stimuli.
+One is very crazy when in love.
+The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.
+I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection.
+If there are quarrels between the parents or if their marriage is unhappy, the ground will be prepared in their children for the severest predisposition to a disturbance of sexual development or to neurotic illness.
+When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.
+Religious ideas have sprung from the same need as all the other achievements of culture: from the necessity for defending itself against the crushing supremacy of nature.
+Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but ... a powerful measure of desire for aggression had to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment.
+A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.
+The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.
+We must not allow ourselves to be deflected by the feminists who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth.
+A poor girl may have an illusion that a prince will come and fetch her home. It is possible, some such cases have occurred. That the Messiah will come and found a golden age is much less probable.
+A hero is a man who stands up manfully against his father and in the end victoriously overcomes him.
+I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador
+Instinct of love toward an object demands a mastery to obtain it, and if a person feels they can't control the object or feel threatened by it, they act negatively toward it.
+There is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and ... if that procedure is employed, every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking life.
+I no longer count as one of my merits that I always tell the truth as much as possible; it has become my metier.
+So in every individual the two trends, one towards personal happiness and the other unity with the rest of humanity, must contend with each other.
+Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.
+We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.
+Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis.
+I cannot face with comfort the idea of life without work; work and the free play of the imagination are for me the same thing, I take no pleasure in anything else.
+Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
+There is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity's aggressive tendencies... Complete suppression of man's aggressive tendencies is not an issue; what we may try is to direct it into a channel other than that of warfare.
+What good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?
+We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast.
+There is a powerful force within us, an un-illuminated part of the mind - separate from the conscious mind that is constantly at work molding our thought, feelings, and actions.
+A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by 'mere' words. He will feel that he is being asked to believe in magic. And he will not be so very wrong, for the words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic. But we shall have to follow a roundabout path in order to explain how science sets about restoring to words a part at least of their former magical power.
+I had thought about cocaine in a kind of day-dream.
+Cigars served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life... I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.
+What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
+The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.
+Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of "God" to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers of God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is not nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines.
+What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
+The idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.
+You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
+Religion originates in the child's and young mankind's fears and need for help. It cannot be otherwise.
+Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war.
+Writing was in its origin, the voice of an absent person.
+Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
+You can always make a lot of people love one another so long as there are a smaller number outside the group for them to kick.
+We must love or we grow ill.
+The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.
+The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.
+The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
+The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
+A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
+Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
+The most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness.
+In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.
+A collection to which nothing can be added and from which nothing can be removed is, in fact, dead!
+Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.
+The ego is not master in its own house.
+Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief.
+Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
+This transmissibility of taboo is a reflection of the tendency, on which we have already remarked, for the unconscious instinct in the neurosis to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects.
+If a man has been his mother's undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it.
+Toward the person who has died we adopt a special attitude: something like admiration for someone who has accomplished a very difficult task.
+In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed by the deep inner needs of our nature.
+A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.
+It is not so much that man is a herd animal, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.
+Talk therapy turns hysterical misery to mundane unhappiness.
+In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense.
+Religion restricts the play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner - which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.
+When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons.
+The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.
+Desire presses ever forward unsubdued.
+Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
+Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.
+The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.
+We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which it can admire, to which it can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats it.
+In matters of sexuality we are at present, every one of us, ill or well, nothing but hypocrites.
+Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.
+It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.
+The wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance.
+The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.
+In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
+No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.
+Creativity is an attempt to resolve a conflict generated by unexpressed biological impulses, such that unfulfilled desires are the driving force of the imagination, and they fuel our dreams and daydreams.
+It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.
+Against the suffering which may come upon one from human relationships the readiest safeguard is voluntary isolation, keeping oneself aloof from other people. The happiness which can be achieved along this path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself.
+Once again, only religion can answer the question of the purpose of life. One can hardly be wrong in concluding that the idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.
+Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?
+What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.
+One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go.
+Life as we find it is too hard for us; it entails too much pain, too many disappointments, impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.
+If youth knew; if age could.
+Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.
+The psychoanalysis of neurotics has taught us to recognize the intimate connection between wetting the bed and the character trait of ambition.
+Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.
+Where id was, there ego shall be.
+The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction ... One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgements of value follow directly from his wihes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments.
+The adoption of the required attitude of mind towards ideas that seem to emerge "of their own free will" and the abandonment of the critical function that is normally in operation against them seem to be hard of achievement for some people. The "involuntary thoughts" are liable to release a most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent their emergence. If we may trust that great poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, however, poetic creation must demand an exactly similar attitude.
+The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.
+Let us consider the polarity of love and hate.... Now, clinical observation shows not only that love is with unexpected regularityaccompanied by hate (ambivalence), and not only that in human relationships hate is frequently a forerunner of love, but also that in many circumstances hate changes into love and love into hate.
+The voice of the intellect is soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endless rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind.
+A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion - in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. It has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.
+The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.
+The gods retain their threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.
+Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less "perfect".
+But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id.
+It is a mistake to believe that science consists in nothing but conclusively proved propositions, and it is unjust to demand that it should. It is a demand made by those who feel a craving for authority in some form to replace the religious catechism by something else, even a scientific one.
+It might be said of psychoanalysis that if you give it your little finger it will soon have your whole hand.
+The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization - a kind of sublimation, therefore.
+When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us.
+The whole thing [religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.
+One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]
+As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.
+The three major mother gods of the Eastern populations seemed to be generating and destroying entities at the same time; both goddesses of life and fertility as well as goddesses of death.
+When we share - that is poetry in the prose of life.
+The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.
+The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.
+The facts which have caused us to believe in the dominance of the pleasure principle in mental life also find expression in the hypothesis that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant.
+Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?
+The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life.
+One must not be mean with affections; what is spent of the funds is renewed in the spending itself. Left untouched for too long, they diminish imperceptibly or the lock gets rusty; they are there all right but one cannot make use of them.
+The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego, is uncomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tamed instinct. The reason is becoming the enemy that prevents us from a lot of possibilities of pleasure.
+No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community. The possibility it offers of displacing a large amount of libidinal components, whether narcissistic, aggressive or even erotic, on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it lends it a value by no means second to what it enjoys as something indispensable to the preservation and justification of existence in society.
+This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.
+Religious illusion must bow to scientific truth. It is in total error about the nature of the true world. Only science is not an illusion.
+Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this.
+A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.
+Smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss.
+When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.
+A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
+Just as a satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us, so severe suffering is caused us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses to sate our needs. One may therefore hope to be freed from a part of one's sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses.
+Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
+The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.
+The state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us repression, and we assert that the force which instituted the repression and maintains it is perceived as resistance during the work of analysis.
+I take up the standpoint that the tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man, and I come back now to the statement that it constitutes the most powerful obstacle to culture.
+The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.
+Opposition is not necessarily enmity.
+The poor ego has a still harder time of it; it has to serve three harsh masters, and it has to do its best to reconcile the claims and demands of all three...The three tyrants are the external world, the superego, and the id.
+Writers write for fame, wealth, power and the love of women.
+We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.
+The world is no nursery.
+Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety.
+These [religious ideas] are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fullfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.
+In the development of mankind as a whole, just as in individuals, love alone acts as the civilizing factor in the sense that it brings a change from egoism to altruism.
+The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain.
+When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any the more clearly for doing so.
+At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.
+Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
+Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfillment, where, for certain people, if the process did not take place it would put them in self-danger of coming to mental harm, being unable to cope with the idea of a godless, purposeless life.
+Long ago man formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires - or forbidden to him - he attributed to these gods... Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself.
+A love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a part of its own value, by doing an injustice to its object; and secondly, not all men are worthy of love.
+It must be pointed out, however, that strictly speaking it is incorrect to talk of the dominance of the pleasure principle over the course of mental processes. If such a dominance existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion.
+Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessites.
+It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.
+Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.
+Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.
+A strong egoism is a protection against disease, but in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, and must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love.
+Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.
+It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too
+Love can not be much younger than the lust for murder.
+Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past.
+Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
+Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and the external world.
+A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.
+By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression.
+I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.
+The view is often defended that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basal concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them.
+Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.
+One must not be mean with the affections; what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.
+Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals. The power of this community is then set up as right in opposition to the power of the individual, which is condemned as brute force.
+The effect of the consolations of religion may be compared to that of a narcotic.
+He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.
+It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.
+Dreams are the guardians of sleep and not its disturbers.
+Civilized people have exchanged some part of their chances of happiness for a measure of security.
+What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm.
+Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.
+The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
+He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.
+Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
+It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to happiness - just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed, under the influence of the external world, changed into the more modest reality principle -, if a man thinks himself happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the background.
+But the less a man knows about the past and the present the more insecure must prove to be his judgment of the future.
+Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are froward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough, or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body. -- A love letter from Freud to his fianc�e.
+The unconscious - that is to say, the 'repressed' - offers no resistance whatever to the efforts of the treatment. Indeed, it itself has no other endeavour than to break through the pressure weighing down on it and force its way either to consciousness or to a discharge through some real action.
+The essence of analysis is surprise. When people are themselves surprised by what they say, that's when they are really making some progress.
+Pathology has made us acquainted with a great number of states in which the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or in which they are actually drawn incorrectly. There are cases in which parts of a person's own body, even portions of his own mental life - his perceptions, thoughts and feelings -, appear alien to him and as not belonging to his ego; there are other cases in which he ascribes to the external world things that clearly originate in his own ego and that ought to be acknowledged by it.
+Thus we arrive at the singular conclusion that of all the information passed by our cultural assets it is precisely the elements which might be of the greatest importance to us and which have the task of solving the riddles of the universe and of reconciling us to the sufferings of life -- it is precisely those elements that are the least well authenticated of any.
+We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a 'dark continent' for psychology.
+It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.
+If the truth of religious doctrines is dependent on an inner experience that bears witness to the truth, what is one to make of the many people who do not have that experience?
+No matter how much restriction civilization imposes on the individual, he nevertheless finds some way to circumvent it. Wit is the best safety valve modern man has evolved; the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is for wit.".
+No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.
+One... gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature of civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed.
+It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.
+Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be.
+The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious.
+We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.
+Much of our highly valued cultural heritage has been acquired at the cost of sexuality.
+In general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it - the present, that is to say, must have become the past - before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future.
+Tobacco is the only excuse for Columbus's misadventure in discovering America.
+[The child receives impressions like] a photographic exposure that can be developed after any interval of time and transformed into a picture.
+I do not think our successes can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious.
+No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
+In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?
+There are no mistakes.
+I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.
+Only the real, rare, true scientific minds can endure doubt, which is attached to all our knowledge.
+The pleasure principle long persists, however, as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts, which are so hard to 'educate', and, starting from those instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.
+The dream unites the grossest contradictions, permits impossibilities, sets aside the knowledge that influences us by day, and exposes us as ethically and morally obtuse.
+"He sido un hombre afortunado en la vida, nada me ha sido facil." "I've been a fortunate man in life, nothing has come easy"
+In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.
+But one thing about human beings puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.
+America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless.
+Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.
+Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal. It knows nothing that is negative; in it contradictories coincide. This may be the secret of heroism.
+Where such men love they have no desire and where they desire they cannot love
+No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life.
+I cannot face the idea of life without work. What would one do when ideas failed or words refused to come? It is impossible not to shudder at the thought.
+At first the analysing physician could do no more than discover the unconscious material that was concealed from the patient, put it together, and, at the right moment, communicate it to him. Psychoanalysis was then first and foremost an art of interpreting. Since this did not solve the therapeutic problem, a further aim quickly came in view: to oblige the patient to confirm the analyst's construction from his own memory.
+The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty.
+I was making frequent use of cocaine at that time ... I had been the first to recommend the use of cocaine, in 1885, and this recommendation had brought serious reproaches down on me.
+The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.
+public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self.
+An overwhelming majority of symbols in dreams are sexual symbols.
+Sexual morality - as society in its extreme form, the American, defines it - is contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.
+A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.
+There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and unconscious ego operates under the sway of the pleasure principle: it seeks to avoid the unpleasure which would be produced by the liberation of the repressed.
+I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot inquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.
+The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.
+I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality... I expect it to provide all further enlightenment.
+Every man has a right over his own life and war destroys lives that were full of promise; it forces the individual into situations that shame his manhood, obliging him to murder fellow men, against his will.
+The game replaces sexual enjoyment by pleasure in movement.
+Now it is nothing but torture.
+After all, we did not invent symbolism; it is a universal age-old activity of the human imagination.
+Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
+To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living being Illusion can have no value if it makes this more difficult for us.
+The first requisite of civilization, therefore, is that of justice � that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of an individual. This implies nothing as to the ethical value of such a law.
+The goal towards which the pleasure principle impels us - of becoming happy - is not attainable: yet we may not - nay, cannot - give up the efforts to come nearer to realization of it by some means or other.
+All elongated objects, such as sticks, tree-trunks and umbrellas(the opening of these last being comparable to an erection) may stand for the male organ...Boxes, cases, chests, cupboards, and ovens represent the uterus...Rooms in dreams are usually women...Many landscapes in dreams, especially any containing breidges or wooded hills, may clearly be recognized as descriptions of the genitals.
+The sexual wishes in regard to the mother become more intense and the father is perceived as an obstacle to the; this gives rise to the Oedipus complex.
+dream is the dreamer's own psychical act.
+Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
+No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community.
+What is common in all these dreams is obvious. They completely satisfy wishes excited during the day which remain unrealized. They are simply and undisguisedly realizations of wishes.
+The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim...to save mankind from this sense of guilt, which they call sin.
+In almost every place where we find totems we also find a law against persons of the same totem having sexual relations with one another and consequently against their marrying. This, then, is 'exogamy', an institution related to totemism.
+The study of dreams may be considered the most trustworthy method of investigating deep mental processes. Now dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright.
+Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis.
+There is to my mind no doubt that the concept of beautiful had its roots in sexual excitation and that its original meaning was sexually stimulating.
+One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of Creation.' . . . We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.
+I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.
+Yes, America is gigantic, but a gigantic mistake.
+The division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premise of psycho-analysis; and it alone makes it possible for psycho-analysis to understand the pathological processes in mental life, which are as common as they are important, and to find a place for them in the framework of science.
+The communal life of human beings had . . . a two-fold foundation: the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity, and the power of love.
+These patients have turned away from outer reality; it is for this reason that they are more aware than we of inner reality and can reveal to us things which without them would remain impenetrable.
+Free sexual intercourse between young males and respectable girls" was urgently necessary or society was "doomed to fall a victim to incurable neuroses which reduce the enjoyment of life to a minimum, destroy the marriage relation and bring hereditary ruin on the whole coming generation.
+As everyone knows, the ancients before Aristotle did not consider the dream a product of the dreaming mind, but a divine inspiration, and in ancient times the two antagonistic streams, which one finds throughout in the estimates of dream life, were already noticeable. They distinguished between true and valuable dreams, sent to the dreamer to warn him or to foretell the future, and vain, fraudulent, and empty dreams, the object of which was to misguide or lead him to destruction.
+We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.
+There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one.
+We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.
+A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content.
+The psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race.
+The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.
+The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God; in that way he would be playing the same part as an agent of economic discharge as the Jew does in the world of the Aryan ideal. But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil just as well as for the existence of the wickedness which the Devil embodies.
+I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it.
+In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.
+One becomes gradually accustomed to a new realization of the nature of 'happiness': one has to assume happiness when Fate does not carry out all its threats simultaneously.
+Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.
+When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly suprised at the weakness of his intellect.
+A state of consciousness is characteristically very transitory; an idea that is conscious now is no longer so a moment later, although it can become so again under certain conditions that are easily brought about.
+It almost looks like analysis were the third of those 'impossible' professions in which one can be quite sure of unsatisfying results. The other two, much older-established, are the bringing up of children and the government of nations.
+We should picture the instrument that carries our mental functioning as resembling a compound microscope or photographic apparatus.
+The rest of our enquiry is made easy because this God-Creator is openly called Father. Psycho-analysis concludes that he really is the father, clothed in the grandeur in which he once appeared to the small child.
+The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life.
+Civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers. In them the replacement of religious motives for civilized behaviors by other, secular motives, would proceed unobtrusively. . . .
+The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface. If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with the 'cortical homunculus' of the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces
+A lady once expressed herself in society - the very words show that they were uttered with fervour and under the pressure of a great many secret emotions: "Yes, a woman must be pretty if she is to please the men. A man is much better off. As long as he has five straight limbs, he needs no more!"
+Loneliness and darkness have just robbed me of my valuables.
+The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.
+What is a totem? It is as a rule an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. In the first place, the totem is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is their guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if dangerous to others, recognizes and spares its own children.
+[The child] takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.
+Christmas is the alcoholidays
+Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us O'er the world's tempestuous sea; Guard us, guide us, keep us, feed us, For we have no help but Thee.
+The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to defend it. The development of civilization imposes restrictions on it, and justice demands that no one shall escape those restrictions.
+Towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state -- admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological -- in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that "I" and "you" are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.
+Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.
+What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Spinoza.txt

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+The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.
+No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.
+If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
+The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.
+The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.
+What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter.
+Reason connot defeat emotion, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion.
+Nothing in nature is by chance... Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.
+Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.
+The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.
+The highest endeavor of the mind, and the highest virtue, it to understand things by intuition.
+Desire nothing for yourself, which you do not desire for others.
+The holy word of God is on everyone's lips...but...we see almost everyone presenting their own versions of God's word, with the sole purpose of using religion as a pretext for making others think as they do.
+When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.
+The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.
+He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.
+Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.
+Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.
+Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.
+A good thing which prevents us from enjoying a greater good is in truth an evil.
+God is not He who is, but That which is.
+Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love.
+Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.
+In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity.
+Big fish eat small fish with as much right as they have power.
+We must take care not to admit as true anything, which is only probable. For when one falsity has been let in, infinite others follow.
+Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.
+Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human imaginings.
+We feel and know that we are eternal.
+Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.
+Indulge yourself in pleasures only in so far as they are necessary for the preservation of health.
+All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
+[Believers] are but triflers who, when they cannot explain a thing, run back to the will of God; this is, truly, a ridiculous way of expressing ignorance.
+Let unswerving integrity be your watchword.
+I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.
+Sadness diminishes a man's powers
+Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.
+What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness.
+The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.
+Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.
+Those who know the true use of money, and regulate the measure of wealth according to their needs, live contented with few things.
+Nature is satisfied with little; and if she is, I am also.
+Minds are not conquered by force, but by love and high-mindedness.
+He, who knows how to distinguish between true and false, must have an adequate idea of true and false.
+Freedom is self-determination.
+He who loves God cannot endeavor that God should love him in return.
+Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds.
+Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.
+Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.
+. . . to know the order of nature, and regard the universe as orderly is the highest function of the mind.
+To understand something is to be delivered of it.
+He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.
+To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man. Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.
+The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.
+the ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain by fear, nor to exact obedience, but to free every man from fear that he may live in all possible security... In fact the true aim of government is liberty.
+Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.
+Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved, and fostered by fear.
+If facts conflict with a theory, either the theory must be changed or the facts.
+The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self.
+Men who are ruled by reason desire nothing for themselves which they would not wish for all mankind.
+Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.
+Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.
+The eternal wisdom of God ... has shown itself forth in all things, but chiefly in the mind of man, and most of all in Jesus Christ.
+I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.
+Laws which can be broken without any wrong to one's neighbor are a laughing-stock; and such laws, instead of restraining the appetites and lusts of mankind, serve rather to heighten them. Nitimur in vetitum semper, cupimusque negata [we always resist prohibitions, and yearn for what is denied us].
+A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.
+Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.
+I can control my passions and emotions if I can understand their nature
+We are so constituted by Nature that we easily believe the things we hope for, but believe only with difficulty those we fear, and that we regard such things more or less highly than is just. This is the source of the superstitions by which men everywhere are troubled. For the rest, I don
+Pride is over-estimation of oneself by reason of self-love.
+Only free men are thoroughly grateful one to another.
+The terms good and bad indicate no positive quality in things regarded in themselves, but are merely modes of thinking or notions, which we form from the comparison of things one with another. Thus one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance, music is good for him that is melancholy, bad for him that mourns; for him that is deaf; it is neither good nor bad.
+Speculation, like nature, abhors a vacuum.
+Everything in nature is a cause from which there flows some effect.
+Blessed are the weak who think that they are good because they have no claws.
+For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from force of character: for obedience is the constant will to execute what, by the general decree of the commonwealth, ought to be done.
+No to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand.
+He who lives according to the guidance of reason strives as much as possible to repay the hatred, anger, or contempt of others towards himself with love or generosity. ...hatred is increased by reciprocal hatred, and, on the other hand, can be extinguished by love, so that hatred passes into love.
+He who regulates everything by laws, is more likely to arouse vices than reform them.
+In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.
+God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.
+The greatest secret of monarchic rule...is to keep men deceived and to cloak in the specious name of religion the fear by which they must be checked, so that they will fight for slavery as they would for salvation, and will think it not shameful, but a most honorable achievement, to give their life and blood that one man may have a ground for boasting.
+I believe that a triangle, if it could speak, would say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle that the divine nature is eminently circular; and thus would every one ascribe his own attributes to God.
+All is One (Nature, God)
+Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues.
+Everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find.
+Everyone endeavors as much as possible to make others love what he loves, and to hate what he hates... This effort to make everyone approve what we love or hate is in truth ambition, and so we see that each person by nature desires that other persons should live according to his way of thinking.
+The mind has greater power over the emotions, and is less subject thereto, insofar as it understands all things to be necessary.
+True virtue is life under the direction of reason.
+I call him free who is led solely by reason.
+Faith is nothing but obedience and piety.
+The more intelligible a thing is, the more easily it is retained in the memory, and counterwise, the less intelligible it is, the more easily we forget it.
+Of all the things that are beyond my power, I value nothing more highly than to be allowed the honor of entering into bonds of friendship with people who sincerely love truth. For, of things beyond our power, I believe there is nothing in the world which we can love with tranquility except such men.
+Happiness is not the reward of virtue, but is virtue itself; nor do we delight in happiness because we restrain from our lusts; but on the contrary, because we delight in it, therefore we are able to restrain them.
+Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.
+Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods.
+All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.
+If anyone conceives that he is loved by another, and believes that he has given no cause for such love, he will love that other in return.
+One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.
+Whatsoever is, is in God.
+He whose honor depends on the opinion of the mob must day by day strive with the greatest anxiety, act and scheme in order to retain his reputation. For the mob is varied and inconsistent, and therefore if a reputation is not carefully preserved it dies quickly.
+True piety for the universe but no time for religions made for man's convenience.
+It is usually the case with most men that their nature is so constituted that they pity those who fare badly and envy those who fare well.
+The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed along with the body, but something of it remains, which is eternal.
+Reality and perfection are synonymous.
+Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men.
+So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long as he is determined not to do it; and consequently so long as it is impossible to him that he should do it.
+He who wishes to revenge injuries by reciprocal hatred will live in misery. But he who endeavors to drive away hatred by means of love, fights with pleasure and confidence; he resists equally one or many men, and scarcely needs at all the help of fortune. Those whom he conquers yield joyfully
+Ceremonies are no aid to blessedness.
+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.
+If slavery, barbarism and desolation are to be called peace, men can have no worse misfortune.
+In the state of nature, wrong-doing is impossible ; or, if anyone does wrong, it is to himself, not to another.
+The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole nature.
+In the mind there is no absolute or free will.
+None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.
+Laws directed against opinions affect the generous-minded rather than the wicked, and are adapted less for coercing criminals than for irritating the upright.
+I have tried sedulously not to laugh at the acts of man, nor to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them.
+Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.
+If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.
+Statesman are suspected of plotting against mankind, rather than consulting their interests, and are esteemed more crafty than learned.
+Schisms do not originate in a love of truth, which is a source of courtesy and gentleness, but rather in an inordinate desire for supremacy.
+In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.
+All laws which can be broken without any injury to another, are counted but a laughing-stock, and are so far from bridling the desires and lusts of men, that on the contrary they stimulate
+them.
+...The body is affected by the image of the thing, in the same way as if the thing were actually present.
+God is a thing that thinks.
+I saw that all things I feared, and which feared me, had nothing good or bad in them save insofar as the mind was affected by them.
+Everyone has as much right as he has might.
+Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things.
+The less the mind understands and the more things it perceives, the greater its power of feigning is; and the more things it understands, the more that power is diminished.
+There is no fear without some hope, and no hope without some fear.
+Nature offers nothing that can be called this man's rather than another's; but under nature everything belongs to all.
+.... we are a part of nature as a whole, whose order we follow.
+The mind can only imagine anything, or remember what is past, while the body endures.
+The virtue of a free man appears equally great in refusing to face difficulties as in overcoming them.
+It may easily come to pass that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance.
+Measure, time and number are nothing but modes of thought or rather of imagination.
+Men will find that they can ... avoid far more easily the perils which beset them on all sides by united action.
+The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.
+A miracle signifies nothing more than an event... the cause of which cannot be explained by another familiar instance, or.... which the narrator is unable to explain.
+Desire is the essence of a man.
+Men are especially intolerant of serving and being ruled by, their equals.
+Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause, and hatred pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause.
+He that can carp in the most eloquent or acute manner at the weakness of the human mind is held by his fellows as almost divine.
+Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
+Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.
+Ambition is the immoderate desire for honor.
+A man is as much affected pleasurably or painfully by the image of a thing past or future as by the image of a thing present.
+To comprehend an idea, a person must simultaneously accept it as true. Conscious analysis - which, depending on the idea, may occur almost immediately or with considerable effort - allows the mind to reject what it intially accepted as fact.
+God and all attributes of God are eternal.
+After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.
+Love or hatred towards a thing, which we conceive to be free, must, other things being similar, be greater than if it were felt towards a thing acting by necessity.
+Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak.
+Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.
+He who seeks to regulate everything by law is more likely to arouse vices than to reform them. It is best to grant what cannot be abolished, even though it be in itself harmful. How many evils spring from luxury, envy, avarice, drunkenness and the like, yet these are tolerated because they cannot be prevented by legal enactments.
+We strive to further the occurrence of whatever we imagine will lead to Joy, and to avert or destroy what we imagine is contrary to it, or will lead to Sadness.
+If we love something similar to ourselves, we endeavor, as far as we can, to bring it about that it should love us in return.
+self-preservation is the primary and only foundation of virtue.
+Whatever increases, decreases, limits or extends the body's power of action, increases decreases, limits, or extends the mind's power of action. And whatever increases, decreases, limits, or extends the mind's power of action, also increases, decreases, limits, or extends the body's power of action.
+Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favours, they are consequently for the most part, very prone to credulity.