The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Silence is the safest course for any man to adopt who distrusts himself.
Consistency is the foundation of virtue.
States are doomed when they are unable to distinguish good men from bad.
When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotisation, coming to your senses, but of course to do that you have to go out of your mind.
To a Friend of Light If you want to spare your eyes and your mind, follow the sun from the shadows behind.
He who steps upon his misery stands higher.
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
Pleasure is the beginning and end of the blessed life.
A man's nature runs either to herbs or weeds; therefore let him seasonably water the one, and destroy the other.
An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.
One does not exist without doing something,
Skill to do comes of doing; knowledge comes by eyes always open, and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.
It is through their completeness that souls are happy.
All concepts, even those which are closest to experience, are from the point of view of logic freely chosen conventions.
We have to watch out for the traps of words.
All men are not capable of great things, but all are sensitive to great things.
There is a higher court than courts of justice, and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.
O Lord, that lends me life, Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness!
When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point.
The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think.
The earth teaches us more about ourselves than all the books in the world, because it is resistant to us. Self-discovery comes when man measures himself against an obstacle.
Philosophy is true mother of the arts.
Now do you think one can acquire any appreciable knowledge of the nature of the soul without knowing the nature of the whole?
Who knows? How odd and fickle is life ! How little is needed to ruin or rescue us !
We feel and experience ourselves to be eternal.
A man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.
The present alone is true and real: it is time as it is really fulfilled and our existence lies exclusively in it.
Rewards and punishments, to speak frankly, are the desk of the soul, that is, a means of enslaving a child's spirit, and better suited to provoke than to prevent deformities.
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
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