Love is metaphysical gravity.

Love is metaphysical gravity.

No thing great is created...

No thing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

Better be mute, than dispute...

Better be mute, than dispute with the Ignorant.

It is not how things...

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (6.44)

It is frequently expressed in...

It is frequently expressed in all parts of Scripture, that the worship of the stars would be followed by absence of rain, devastation of the land, bad times, diseases, and shortness of life. But abandonment of that worship, and the return to the service of God, would be the cause of the presence of rain, fertility of the ground, good times, health and length of life. Thus Scripture teaches, in order that man should abandon idolatry, the reverse of that which idolatrous priests preached to the people, for, as has been shown by us, the principal object of the Law is to remove this doctrine, and to destroy its traces.

The poor, short lone fact...

The poor, short lone fact dies at birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven and bathes it in immortal waters.

I never try to tell...

I never try to tell anybody else what to do, number one. And number two, I think that's what the individual is all about. Each one of us has something to contribute. This really depends on each one doing their own thinking, but not following any kind of rule that I can give out, any command. We're all on the frontier, we're all in a great mystery — incredibly mysterious. Each one possesses exactly what each one is working out, and what each one works out relates to their particular set of circumstances of any one day, or any one place around the world.

He is a priest...

He is a priest before he is a philosopher, and he loves oracles, legends and revelations as an intuitive starting point for philosophical ideas. This gave him a character that was both mysterious and superstitious, which differs from that of the usual Greek philosophers, just as the importance given to the doctrines of the Chaldeans and Babylonian science differs from their method; while in this he is similar to the practice of the Gnostics. However, reading the treatises he composed reveals a very clear mind, a profound thinker, who in his exhortation to philosophy (composed in emulation of an early treatise by Aristotle) achieves a high level of awareness of the history of philosophy and poses and resolves concepts that are not insignificant in the context of Neoplatonism.

Be not swept off your...

Be not swept off your feet by the vividness of the impression, but say, "Impression, wait for me a little. Let me see what you are and what you represent. Let me try you."

The games which can be...

The games which can be built up from the simple idea of dots and lines... can be a productive source of teaching material. After all, s provided the Pythagoreans and neo-Pythagoreans with important theorems about the summing of series.

As for civilization, from which...

As for civilization, from which at last we are about to escape, so far from being the social destiny of man, it is only a transient stage - a state of temporary evil with which globes are afflicted during the first ages of their career; it is for the human race a disease of infancy, like teething; but it is a disease which has been prolonged in our globe at least twenty centuries beyond its natural term, owing to the neglect on the part of the ancient philosophy to study association and passional attraction.

We are asleep. Our Life...

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

The general character and disposition...

The general character and disposition of the Rationalist are, I think, not difficult to identify. At bottom he stands (he always stands) for independence of mind on all occasions, for thought free from obligation to any authority save the authority of 'reason'. His circumstances in the modern world have made him contentious: he is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. His mental attitude is at once sceptical and optimistic: sceptical, because there is no opinion, no habit, no belief, nothing so firmly rooted or so widely held that he hesitates to question it and to judge it by what he calls his 'reason'; optimistic, because the Rationalist never doubts the power of his 'reason' (when properly applied) to determine the worth of a thing, the truth of an opinion or the propriety of an action.

The person who screams, or...

The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide the want of measure.

[C. West Churchman exposed the...

[C. West Churchman exposed the indifferentist position of some researchers — planners belonging to this school in the following terms:] And if our clients blow up the world, land us in starvation or totalitarianism, that is too bad, but we remained pure in heart to the last, didn't we?

Let a man once overcome...

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.

An evil may be real,...

An evil may be real, tho' its cause has no relation to us: It may be real, without being peculiar: It may be real, without shewing itself to others: It may be real, without being constant: And it may be real, without falling under the general rules. Such evils as these will not fail to render us miserable, tho' they have little tendency to diminish pride: And perhaps the most real and the most solid evils of life will be found of this nature.

Whatever moral rules you have...

Whatever moral rules you have deliberately proposed to yourself abide by them as they were laws, and as if you would be guilty of impiety by violating any of them. Don't regard what anyone says of you, for this, after all, is no concern of yours. How long, then, will you put off thinking yourself worthy of the highest improvements and follow the distinctions of reason? You have received the philosophical theorems, with which you ought to be familiar, and you have been familiar with them. What other master, then, do you wait for, to throw upon that the delay of reforming yourself?... Let whatever appears to be the best be to you an inviolable law.(50).

It was Pythagoras who first...

It was Pythagoras who first called heaven kosmos, because it is perfect, and "adorned" with infinite beauty and living beings.

Let us pardon him his...

Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal?

If a lion could talk,...

If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.

Those who are possessed by...

Those who are possessed by nothing possess everything.

For every minute you are...

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

The systems approach is not...

The systems approach is not a bad idea.

Friendship is almost always the...

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

When we run over libraries,...

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Ionian philosophers... had sought to...

Ionian philosophers... had sought to identify a first principle for all things. Thales had thought to find this in water, but others preferred to think of air or fire as the basic element. The Pythagoreans had taken a more abstract direction, postulating that number... was the basic stuff behind phenomena; this numerical atomism... had come under attack by the followers of Parmenides of Elea... The fundamental tenet of the was the unity and permanence of being... contrasted with the Pythagorean ideas of multiplicity and change. Of Parmenides' disciples the best known was Zeno the Eleatic... who propounded arguments to prove the inconsistency in the concepts of multiplicity and divisibility.

The mob has always behaved...

The mob has always behaved in this way—eagerly open to bribes that cannot be honorably accepted, and dissolutely callous to degradation and insult that cannot be honorably endured.

Aim at being loved without...

Aim at being loved without being admired.

"Muhammad of Arabia ascended the...

"Muhammad of Arabia ascended the highest Heaven and returned. I swear by God that if I had reached that point, I should never have returned.” These are the words of a great Muslim saint, ‘Abd al-Quddūs of Gangoh. In the whole range of Sufi literature it will be probably difficult to find words which, in a single sentence, disclose such an acute perception of the psychological difference between the prophetic and the mystic types of consciousness. The mystic does not wish to return from the repose of “unitary experience”; and even when he does return, as he must, his return does not mean much for mankind at large.

As punishments become more cruel,...

As punishments become more cruel, the minds of men, which like fluids always adjust to the level of their surroundings, become hardened, and the ever lively power of the emotions brings it about that after a hundred years of cruel tortures, the wheel causes no more fear than prison previously did. For a punishment to serve its purpose, it is only necessary that the harm that it inflicts outweighs the benefit that “the criminal can derive from the crime, and into the calculation of this balance, we must add the certainty of punishment and the loss of the good produced by the crime. Anything more than this is superfluous, and therefore tyrannical.

"In America literary reputations come...

"In America literary reputations come and go so swiftly," I complained, fatuously. [Santayana's] answer was swift. "It would be insufferable if they did not."

Creating difficulties for himself for...

Creating difficulties for himself for the pleasure of resolving them is a strange human mania.

People who invented the word...

People who invented the word charity, and used it in a good sense, inculcated more clearly, and much more efficaciously, the precept, Be charitable, than any pretended legislator or prophet, who should insert such a maxim in his writings.

It's only by thinking even...

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.

Finally it should be noted...

Finally it should be noted that the picture education, especially the pictorial statistics, are of international importance. Words carry more emotional elements than set pictures, which can be observed by people of different countries, different parties without any protest; Words divide, pictures unite.

We must be careful to...

We must be careful to discriminate between our own incapacity to test truth and the necessary improbability of an event. It is plain that from our ignorance of the remote spheres of God's action we cannot judge of His works removed from our experience; but a fact is not necessarily doubtful because it cannot be reached by our ordinary senses. To recapitulate, we may lay down the following propositions: 1. That there is no real physical distinction between miracles and any other operations of the Divine energy : that we regard them differently is because we are familiar with one order of events and not the other. 2. There is nothing incredible in a miracle, and the credibility of a miraculous event is to be measured only by the evidence which sustains it. And although the extraordinary character of a phenomenon may render the event itself improbable, it does not, therefore, necessarily render it either incredible or untrue.

The Constitution of 1795, like...

The Constitution of 1795, like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me.

The difference between a man...

The difference between a man who is led by opinion or emotion and one who is led by reason. The former, whether he will or not, performs things of which he is entirely ignorant; the latter is subordinate to no one, and only does those things which he knows to be of primary importance in his life, and which on that account he desires the most; and therefore I call the former a slave, but the latter free.

The philosophical tradition that goes...

The philosophical tradition that goes from Descartes to Husserl, and indeed a large part of the philosophical tradition that goes back to Plato, involves a search for foundations: metaphysically certain foundations of knowledge, foundations of language and meaning, foundations of mathematics, foundations of morality, etc. [...] Now, in the twentieth century, mostly under the influence of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, we have come to believe that this general search for these sorts of foundations is misguided.

If you reason instead of...

If you reason instead of repeating what is taught you; if you analyze the law and strip off those cloudy fictions with which it has been draped in order to conceal its real origin, which is the right of the stronger, and its substance, which has ever been the consecration of all the tyrannies handed down to mankind through its long and bloody history; when you have comprehended this, your contempt for the law will be profound indeed. You will understand that to remain the servant of the written law is to place yourself every day in opposition to the law of conscience, and to make a bargain on the wrong side; and, since this struggle cannot go on forever, you will either silence your conscience and become a scoundrel, or you will break with tradition, and you will work with us for the utter destruction of all this injustice, economic, social and political.

If a lack of empirical...

If a lack of empirical foundations is a defect of the theory of logical probability, it is also a defect of deductive logic.

There is perhaps nothing more...

There is perhaps nothing more interesting than to listen to a superior man talk of what he does not know. He advances slowly, and scarcely puts his foot down without knowing if the ground is solid; he looks for plausible analogies; he tries to attach his ideas to higher and incontestable principles; he always has the tone of looking, never that of teaching; and it often happens that, even if he is mistaken, he leaves a great enough idea of his mental honesty.

This right which you have,...

This right which you have, is not founded any more than his upon any quality or any merit in yourself which renders you worthy of it. Your soul and your body are, of themselves, indifferent to the state of boatman or that of duke; and there is no natural bond that attaches them to one condition rather than to another.

It is futile to speak...

It is futile to speak of liberty as long as economic slavery exists."Speak not of liberty — poverty is slavery!" is not a vain formula; it has penetrated into the ideas of the great working-class masses; it filters through all the present literature; it even carries those along who live on the poverty of others, and takes from them the arrogance with which they formerly asserted their rights to exploitation.

Bias used to say that...

Bias used to say that men ought to calculate life both as if they were fated to live a long and a short time, and that they ought to love one another as if at a future time they would come to hate one another; for that most men were bad.

This art, which I call...

This art, which I call the art of persuading, and which, properly speaking, is simply the process of perfect methodical proofs, consists of three essential parts: of defining the terms of which we should avail ourselves by clear definitions, of proposing principles of evident axioms to prove the thing in question; and of always mentally substituting in the demonstrations the definition in the place of the thing defined.

I was obliged to retract,...

I was obliged to retract, like a good Catholic, this opinion of mine; and as a punishment my dialogue was prohibited; and after five months being dismissed from Rome (at the time that the city of Florence was infected with plague), the habitation which with generous pity was assigned to me, was that of the dearest friend I had in Siena, Monsignor the Archbishop Piccolomini, whose most agreeable conversation I enjoyed with such quite and satisfaction of mind, that having there resumed my studies, I discovered and demonstrated a great number on the mechanical conclusions on the resistance of solids … after about five months, the pestilence having ceased, the confinement of that house was changed by His Holiness for the freedom of the country so agreeable to me, whence I returned to the villa of Bellosguardo, and afterwards to Arcetri, where I still breathe salubrious air near my dear native-country Florence. Stay sane.

Everywhere we remain unfree and...

Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.

Millions of human beings have...

Millions of human beings have labored to create this civilization on which we pride ourselves today. Other millions, scattered through the globe, labor to maintain it. Without them nothing would be left in fifty years but ruins.