The Quotation Cabinet

“For action is indeed the sole medium of expression for ethics. We continually forget that the sphere of morals is the sphere of action.”

“I owed my deliverance, not to a concatenation of proofs and arguments, but to the light which God caused to penetrate into my heart—the light which illuminates the threshold of all knowledge.”

“Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang; / Ye were not made to live like unto brutes, / But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.”

“Nous is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone, itself by itself.”

“It is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.”

“They were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

“Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude...through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.”

“Logic... not a single division, turning on one special point, but being rather an instrument for every art brought to a high degree of accuracy.”

“A city is a natural production, and man is naturally a political animal, and whosoever is naturally and not accidentally unfit for society, must be either inferior or superior to man.”

“It is a working of the soul in the way of excellence or virtue of a certain kind.”

“The good man is to his friend as to himself, friend being but a name for a second Self.”

“Virtue then is in a sense a mean state, since it certainly has an aptitude for aiming at the mean.”

“Accept then, and be pleased with whatsoever doth happen, though otherwise harsh and un-pleasing, as tending to that end, to the health and welfare of the universe, and to Jove's happiness and prosperity.”

“It is in thy power to retire into thyself, and to be at rest, and free from all businesses. A man cannot any whither retire better than to his own soul.”

“Whatsoever thou dost affect, whatsoever thou dost project, so do, and so project all, as one who, for aught thou knowest, may at this very present depart out of this life.”

“The mind doth turn and convert any impediment whatsoever, to be her aim and purpose. So that what before was the impediment, is now the principal object of her working; and that which before was in her way, is now her readiest way.”

“From some high place as it were to look down, and to behold here flocks, and there sacrifices, without number; and all kind of navigation; some in a rough and stormy sea, and some in a calm.”

“Four species of idols beset the human mind, to which (for distinction's sake) we have assigned names, calling the first Idols of the Tribe, the second Idols of the Den, the third Idols of the Market, the fourth Idols of the Theatre.”

“One is not born a woman: one becomes one.”

“Only one answer seems possible—significant form... Significant Form is the one quality common to all works of visual art.”

“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”

“Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.”

“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.”

“This is my art, this the game I never cease to play. I turn the wheel that spins. I delight to see the high come down and the low ascend.”

“For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule.”

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts.”

“As a tree, even though it has been cut down, is firm so long as its root is safe, and grows again, thus, unless the feeders of thirst are destroyed, the pain of life will return again and again.”

“For self is the lord of self, self is the refuge of self; therefore curb thyself as the merchant curbs a good horse.”

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger...is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

“The human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

“No kitten, that loves fish, is unteachable; no kitten without a tail will play with a gorilla; kittens with whiskers always love fish.”

“I want you to consider me as a reader of the second kind, and to force me, logically, to accept Z as true.”

“so it suffices me to think and believe that the good Aldonza Lorenzo is fair and virtuous”

“Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?”

“Do I do nothing beyond drawing water? Do I not also dig, and do I not water the land, and do all sorts of things for the sake of philosophy?”

“Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.”

“Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.”

“Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.”

“I may lay this down as a principle, that whenever this sentence I am, I exist, is spoken or thought of by me, it is necessarily true.”

“They could never use words or other signs arranged in such a manner as is competent to us in order to declare our thoughts to others.”

“Because on this side I have a clear and distinct idea of my self, as I am only a thinking thing, not extended; and on the other side because I have a distinct idea of my body, as it is only an extended thing, not thinking, it is from hence certain, that I am really distinct from my body.”

“I will suppose, not an infinitely perfect God, the fountain of truth, but that some evil spirit which is very powerful and crafty has used all his endeavours to deceive me.”

“The enemies of the aesthetic are neither the practical nor the intellectual.”

“Active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends, constitutes reflective thought.”

“Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself.”

“The task of future philosophy is to clarify men's ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day...Philosophy which surrenders its somewhat barren monopoly of dealings with Ultimate and Absolute Reality will find a compensation in enlightening the moral forces which move mankind.”

“If there's no immortality of the soul, then there's no virtue, and everything is lawful.”

“No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet”

“I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”

“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”

“Achilles will never overtake the tortoise. He must first reach the place from which the tortoise started. By that time the tortoise will have got some way ahead.”

“The arrow in flight is at rest. For, if everything is at rest when it occupies a space equal to itself, and what is in flight at any given moment always occupies a space equal to itself, it cannot move.”

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

“Hear first the four roots of all things: shining Zeus, life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis whose tear-drops are a well-spring to mortals.”

“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.”

“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!”

“For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you; but to select the part, belongs to another.”

“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”

“Take away then aversion from all things which are not in our power, and transfer it to the things contrary to nature which are in our power. But destroy desire completely for the present.”

“My opinions alone are mine, and they cannot be taken from me, and I am satisfied while I have them, wherever I may be and whatever I am doing.”

“They who pretend that the soul is incorporeal, utter words destitute of sense; for, if it had this character, it would not be able either to do or to suffer anything.”

“We mean the freedom of the body from pain, and of the soul from confusion.”

“Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge.”

“five men are working on one track and one man on the other”

“Is justified true belief knowledge?”

“Death reveals itself as that possibility which is one's ownmost.”

“The impression of a paradoxical situation is not objectively founded.”

“You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.”

“Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre.”

“Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”

“In such condition, there is no place for Industry... no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

“Life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within; why may we not say, that all automata have an artificial life?”

“They are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

“No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish.”

“EPICURUS's old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?”

“All inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past, and that similar powers will be conjoined with similar sensible qualities.”

“She knows all the physical facts about us and our environment.”

“In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free.”

“You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.”

“Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows.”

“The life of religion consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”

“There are some options between opinions in which this influence must be regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawful determinant of our choice.”

“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.”

“while you are making the choice of life you neglect to live”

“The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.”

“No one else could be admitted here, because this entrance was meant for you alone. I am going now, and I am closing it.”

“Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

“So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only.”

“We must not be in the least prejudiced in favour of the existence of the things, but be quite indifferent in this respect, in order to play the judge in things of taste.”

“The thing of supreme importance is to be rid of the crowd; for the effect of the crowd is to hamstring the whole cause by robbing it of its seriousness while heartfelt sympathy is pretended.”

“The movement of faith must ever be made by virtue of the absurd, but, note well, in such wise that one does not lose the things of this world but wholly and entirely regains them.”

“My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had—no wonder that I return the love!”

“Let right deeds be thy motive, not the fruit which comes from them. And live in action! Labour!”

“This is better, that one do his own task as he may, even though he fail, than take tasks not his own, though they seem good.”

“If there should rise suddenly within the skies sunburst of a thousand suns flooding earth with beams undeemed-of, then might be that Holy One's majesty and radiance dreamed of!”

“The proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.”

“He had such a high reputation as a dialectician, that most people thought that if there were such a science as dialectics among the Gods, it would be in no respect different from that of Chrysippus.”

“He was the first philosopher who spoke of atoms as principles.”

“You have what you have not lost. You have not lost horns, therefore you have horns.”

“Zeno was the first writer who, in his treatise on the Nature of Man, said, that the chief good was confessedly to live according to nature; which is to live according to virtue, for nature leads us to this point.”

“There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water, and yet for attacking things that are firm and strong there is nothing that can take precedence of it.”

“The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.”

“The unwrought material, when divided and distributed, forms vessels. The sage, when employed, becomes the Head of all the Officers of government; and in his greatest regulations he employs no violent measures.”

“The Tao in its regular course does nothing (for the sake of doing it), and so there is nothing which it does not do.”

“God has chosen the best of all possible worlds.”

“The body is prompted by its original constitution to carry out with the help of external things all that it does in accordance with the will of the soul.”

“There is no true enunciation whose reason could not be seen by one possessing all the knowledge necessary for its complete understanding.”

“Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent.”

“Thus labour, in the beginning, gave a right of property, wherever any one was pleased to employ it upon what was common, which remained a long while the far greater part, and is yet more than mankind makes use of.”

“It being the same consciousness that makes a man be himself to himself, personal identity depends on that only.”

“The ideas of primary qualities of bodies are resemblances of them, and their patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves, but the ideas produced in us by these secondary qualities have no resemblance of them at all.”

“Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas.”

“Sublimity is, so to say, the image of greatness of soul.”

“It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved.”

“A prince, therefore, being compelled knowingly to adopt the beast, ought to choose the fox and the lion; because the lion cannot defend himself against snares and the fox cannot defend himself against wolves.”

“It is the opium of the people.”

“I would prefer not to.”

“If righteousness be put last and profit first, they will not be satisfied without snatching all.”

“Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”

“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

“These two methods may be respectively denominated, the Method of Agreement, and the Method of Difference.”

“Petitio Principii, as defined by Archbishop Whately, is the fallacy in which the premise either appears manifestly to be the same as the conclusion, or is actually proved from the conclusion.”

“A completely popular government is the only polity which can make out any claim to this character. It is pre-eminent in both the departments between which the excellence of a political Constitution is divided.”

“Do not turn against the way of the world as it has come down through the ages.”

“Do not do things that serve no purpose.”

“Of the two kinds of seeing, perception and sight, let the eye of perception be strong and the eye of sight weak.”

“Take emptiness as the Way, and see the Way as emptiness.”

“There is rhythm in everything, but the rhythm of strategy cannot be reached without training.”

“A thousand days of practice is forging; ten thousand days of practice is tempering.”

“What is it like to be a bat?”

“Everything goeth, everything returneth; eternally rolleth the wheel of existence. Everything dieth, everything blossometh forth again; eternally runneth on the year of existence.”

“Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!”

“I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?”

“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss.”

“These people seem to divide almost evenly on the problem.”

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”

“Personal identity is not what matters.”

“That It is, and that it is impossible for it not to be, is the way of belief, for truth is its companion.”

“Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is...If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.”

“One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies.”

“Hypothesis is where we find some very curious circumstance, which would be explained by the supposition that it was a case of a certain general rule, and thereupon adopt that supposition.”

“Logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community...Logic is rooted in the social principle.”

“The irritation of doubt is the only immediate motive for the struggle to attain belief. Hence, the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion.”

“Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

“from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.”

“For not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine.”

“The tragic poet is an imitator, and therefore, like all other imitators, he is thrice removed from the king and from the truth.”

“Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den.”

“Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, cities will never have rest from their evils.”

“He sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself; and when he has bound together the three principles within him, which may be compared to the higher, lower, and middle notes of the scale.”

“Beauty for the most part, consists in objects of sight; but it is also received through the ears, by the skilful composition of words, and the consonant proportion of sounds; for in every species of harmony, beauty is to be found.”

“The ship became an illustration to philosophers of the doctrine of growth and change, as some argued that it remained the same, and others, that it did not remain the same.”

“Science is not a system of certain, or well established, statements.”

“No statement is immune to revision.”

“The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.”

“The general will is always right and tends to the public advantage; but it does not follow that the deliberations of the people are always equally correct.”

“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.”

“By loyalty, as you remember, I mean in this preliminary view of loyalty, the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause.”

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way.”

“Consider 'the present King of France is bald.' Here 'the present King of France' has a primary occurrence, and the proposition is false.”

“For if we cannot be sure of the independent existence of objects, we cannot be sure of the independent existence of other people's bodies, and therefore still less of other people's minds, since we have no grounds for believing in their minds except such as are derived from observing their bodies.”

“Form now the assemblage of all classes which are not members of themselves. This is a class: is it a member of itself or not?”

“The official doctrine, which hails chiefly from Descartes, is something like this.”

“In a strict and ultimate sense, then, Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.”

“a certain art of forming contradictory concepts”

“Existence precedes essence.”

“Hell is other people.”

“A last trick is to become personal, insulting, rude, as soon as you perceive that your opponent has the upper hand, and that you are going to come off worst.”

“Music is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself...the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity the Ideas are.”

“Syntax by itself is neither constitutive of nor sufficient for semantics.”

“I bade you have no fears on behalf of Cato himself, because the wise man can neither receive injury nor insult.”

“Let us accustom ourselves to set aside mere outward show, and to measure things by their uses, not by their ornamental trappings.”

“You have asked me, Lucilius, why, if the world be ruled by providence, so many evils befall good men?”

“We do not have a very short time assigned to us, but we lose a great deal of it: life is long enough to carry out the most important projects.”

“there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”

“We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.”

“Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”

“I ought to wade in and pull the child out.”

“Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; neither do we rejoice therein, because we control our lusts, but, contrariwise, because we rejoice therein, we are able to control our lusts.”

“The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.”

“Besides God no substance can be granted or conceived.”

“We have shown that Scripture does not teach philosophy, but merely obedience, and that all it contains has been adapted to the understanding and established opinions of the multitude.”

“A special transmission outside the Scriptures; No dependence upon words and letters; Direct pointing to the soul of man; Seeing into one's nature and the attainment of Buddhahood.”

“their grand maxim is, to cultivate reason, and to be wholly governed by it”

“The sentence 'snow is white' is true if, and only if, snow is white.”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously...hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.”

“Can machines think?”

“I and my children cultivate them; our labour preserves us from three great evils—weariness, vice, and want.”

“There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds”

“I know also that we must cultivate our garden.”

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.”

“When I first introduced the expression moral luck, I expected to suggest an oxymoron.”

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

“I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.”

“A fact is a proposition of which the verification by an appeal to the primary sources of our knowledge or to experience is direct and simple. A theory, on the other hand, if true, has all the characteristics of a fact, except that its verification is possible only by indirect, remote, and difficult means.”

“The bald one is a kind of Sorites; pulling one hair out of a man's head will not make him bald, nor two, nor three, and so on till every hair in his head is pulled out.”

“Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.”

“This tree is good for nothing, and that is how it has attained this size. A wise man might well follow its example.”