Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in persons and things.
Mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else.
Love, children, and work, are the great sources of fertilizing contact between the individual and the rest of the world.
The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique.
Anxiety is the essential condition of intellectual and artistic creation and everything that is finest in human history.
Being in humaneness is good. If we select other goodness and thus are far apart from humaneness, how can we be the wise?
Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!
Avarice, or the desire of gain, is a universal passion which operates at all times, at all places, and upon all persons.
Doctors are always working to preserve our health and cooks to destroy it, but the latter are the more often successful.
What has not been examined impartially has not been well examined. Skepticism is therefore the first step towards truth.
The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.
When you are offended at any man's fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger.
There is probably nothing more sublime than discontent transmuted into a work of art, a scientific discovery, and so on.
Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness
A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.
Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.
Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.
In this infinite space is placed our universe (whether by chance, by necessity, or by providence I do not now consider).
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.
There is but one world common for those who are awake, but when men are asleep, each turns away into a world of his own.
The apparatus defeats its own purpose if its purpose is to create a humane existence on the basis of a humanized nature.
Society ... can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens.
The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.
The sun exactly at noon is exactly [beginning to] go down. And a creature when he is born is exactly [beginning to] die.
Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it.
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.
It is exciting to hear one of your fondest ideas formulated in one fell swoop, better than you could have done yourself.
Those we most often exclude from the normal life of society, people with disabilities, have profound lessons to teach us
At that time [1954], as a result of political events, I was deeply preoccupied by my relations with the Communist Party.
As long as the writer cannot write for the two billion men who are hungry, he will be oppressed by a feeling of malaise.
I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it's urgency.
Say oh wise man how you have come to such knowledge? Because I was never ashamed to confess my ignorance and ask others.
No man is to be credited for his mere authority's sake, unless he can show Scripture for the maintenance of his opinion.
Without doubt, God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it.
It seems to me that responsiveness is a better source for understanding what moral claims are and how they work upon us.
I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme.
Our belief in any particular natural law cannot have a safer basis than our unsuccessful critical attempts to refute it.
Few things under heaven bring more benefit than the lessons learned from silence and the actions taken without striving.
A vessel is formed from a lump of clay with care, however, it is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful.
Government is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper, and make it worthless by applying ink.
Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace.
No increase in the welfare of the member of society can result from the availability of an additional quantity of money.
Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.
A philosopher always finds more grass to feed upon in the valleys of stupidity than on the arid heights of intelligence.
Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something. Hence there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.
Jesus never instructed men to do what was right because it was right; yet this is the true reason why they should do it.