War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.
To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
Do not be deceived by sophists and half philosophers; things do not appear to thee by means of any representatives. Of the thing that exists, and that can exist, thou art conscious immediately ; thou, thyself, art that of which thou art conscious. By a fundamental law of thy being thou art thus presented to thyself, and thrown out of thyself.
And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and could be, if there weren't any other people living in the world.
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.
In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.
Reason does not exist for the sake of life, but life for the sake of reason. An existence which does not of itself satisfy reason and solve all her doubts, cannot be the true one.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.
Who am I? Subject and object in one — contemplating and contemplated, thinking and thought of. As both must I have become what I am.
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
Between being able to and actually doing something lies an ocean and on its bottom rests all too often the wreck of willpower.
I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
A new fundamental science, pure phenomenology, has developed within philosophy: This is a science of a thoroughly new type and endless scope. It is inferior in methodological rigor to none of the modern sciences. All philosophical disciplines are rooted in pure phenomenology, through whose development, and through it alone, they obtain their proper force.
I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.
Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war.
People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.
The power of thought is the light of knowledge, the power of will is the energy of character, the power of heart is love. Reason, love and power of will are perfections of man.
In misfortune we usually regain the peace that we were robbed of through fear of that very misfortune.
All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
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