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Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
As words are not the things we speak about, and structure is the only link between them, structure becomes the only content of knowledge. If we gamble on verbal structures that have no observable empirical structures, such gambling can never give us any structural information about the world. Therefore such verbal structures are structurally obsolete, and if we believe in them, they induce delusions or other semantic disturbances.
God is on the side of the strongest battalions.
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
The only gift is giving to the poor; all else is exchange.
Don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds.
Hell is other people.
The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
It is time we recognized that belief is not a private matter; it has never been merely private. In fact, beliefs are scarcely more private than actions are, for every belief is a fount of action in potential.
People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely.
It is in vain to hope to please all alike. Let a man stand with his face in what direction he will, he must necessarily turn his back on one half of the world.
The distinction between responsible moral agents and beings with diminished or no responsibility is coherent, real, and important.
The journey is what brings us happiness not the destination.
I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.
It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing whatsoever on reason or mental health. Just as there is a folie à deux there is a folie à millions. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same mental pathology does not make these people sane.
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Most people use social media not to open their horizons wider, but to lock themselves in a comfort zone.
Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.
ON SONGWRITING
It's like glueing macaroni to a piece of cardboard and painting it gold
Great souls have wills; feeble souls have wishes.
The number one failure of leaders is their failure to reproduce other leaders.
My favorite animal is steak.
Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom.
When all think alike, then no one is thinking.
Reason should be destroyed in all Christians.
Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.
But among many professional women the existence of sex differences is still a source of discomfort. As one colleague said to me, "Look, I know that males and females are not identical. I see it in my kids, I see it in myself, I know about the research. I can't explain it, but when I read claims of sex differences, steam comes out of my ears."
Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?
Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me.
Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.
It will happen but it will take time.
When you practice gratefulness, there is a sense of respect toward others.
The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.
No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.
We are permitted to suppose that the relatively small size of the female brain depends in part upon her physical inferiority and in part upon her intellectual inferiority.
Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.
The man accustomed to the ways of society is always outside himself and knows how to live only in the opinions of others. And it is, as it were, from their judgement alone that he draws the sentiment of his own existence.
Everyone needs to be loved, especially when they do not deserve it.
The map is not the territory … The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map...
If you want peace of mind I suggest you resign as general manager of the universe.
Let us read and let us dance - two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.
Give me a morality that equally suits the healthy and the sick, men and women, children, adults, and old people.
Well done is better than well said.
Fear and trust cannot go together.
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.
I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government.
You know, if we understand one question rightly, all questions are answered. But we don't know how to ask the right question. To ask the right question demands a great deal of intelligence and sensitivity. Here is a question, a fundamental question: is life a torture? It is, as it is; and man has lived in this torture centuries upon centuries, from ancient history to the present day, in agony, in despair, in sorrow; and he doesn't find a way out of it. Therefore he invents gods, churches, all the rituals, and all that nonsense, or he escapes in different ways. What we are trying to do, during all these discussions and talks here, is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the mind, not accept things as they are, nor revolt against them. Revolt doesn't answer a thing. You must understand it, go into it, examine it, give your heart and your mind, with everything that you have, to find out a way of living differently. That depends on you, and not on someone else, because in this there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no Saviour. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything. And to understand is to transform what is.
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
Tell me what you are reading and I will tell you who you are.
Alimony is like buying oats for a dead horse.
The truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death.
The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.
When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny. 
In the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong.
The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing it describes. Whenever the map is confused with the territory, a 'semantic disturbance' is set up in the organism. The disturbance continues until the limitation of the map is recognized.
The present non-aristotelian system is based on fundamental negative premises; namely, the complete denial of 'identity.'
Philosophy is an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.
When you deal with something like compassion for physical pain, which we know is very, very old in evolution - we can find evidence for it in nonhuman species - the brain processes it at a faster speed. Compassion for mental pain took many seconds longer.
Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral...
No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
It is always easier for one man to solve another man's problem.
We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.
the question is not how to get rid of fear, but how to awaken the intelligence with which to face and to understand and go beyond fear.
I confused things with their names: that is belief.
The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.
Before solving a problem, make sure you've got the right problem.
The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.
True compassion is helping people help themselves.
There are times when I catch myself believing that there is such a thing as something; which is separate from something else.
Without darkness there are no dreams. 
One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.
If you can cultivate the right attitude, your enemies are your best spiritual teachers because their presence provides you with the opportunity to enhance and develop tolerance, patience and understanding.
History is made by historians. No event becomes a historic event unless historians turn it into one.
A good friend who points out mistakes and imperfections and rebukes evil is to be respected as if he reveals the secret of some hidden treasure.
Only the village idiot thinks they "belong",
Someone stole all my credit cards, but I won't report it. The thief spends less than my wife.
Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion.
The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it
The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.
When I'm right no one remembers, when I'm wrong no one forgets.
Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.
Business, that's easily defined - it's other people's money.
Nowadays, we are confronted by a huge gap between rich and poor. This is not only morally wrong, but practically a mistake. It leads to the rich living in anxiety and the poor living in frustration, which has the potential to lead to more violence. We have to work to reduce this gap. It's truly unfair that some people should have so much while others go hungry.
As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.
Let’s not pretend that things will change if we keep doing the same things. A crisis can be a real blessing to any person, to any nation. For all crises bring progress. Creativity is born from anguish, just like the day is born form the dark night. It’s in crisis that inventiveness is born, as well as discoveries made and big strategies.
He who overcomes crisis, overcomes himself, without getting overcome. He who blames his failure to a crisis neglects his own talent and is more interested in problems than in solutions. Incompetence is the true crisis.
The greatest inconvenience of people and nations is the laziness with which they attempt to find the solutions to their problems. There’s no challenge without a crisis. Without challenges, life becomes a routine, a slow agony. There’s no merit without crisis. It’s in the crisis where we can show the very best in us. Without a crisis, any wind becomes a tender touch.
To speak about a crisis is to promote it. Not to speak about it is to exalt conformism. Let us work hard instead. Let us stop, once and for all, the menacing crisis that represents the tragedy of not being willing to overcome it.
There are living systems; there is no living "matter." No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell.
As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.
Ethical ideas and sentiments have to be considered as parts of the phenomena of life at large. We have to deal with man as a product of evolution, with society as a product of evolution, and with moral phenomena as products of evolution.
An open heart is an open mind.
I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.
Everyone who has eyes to see can see that if the God of Abraham exists, He is an utter psychopath--and the God of Nature too. If you can't see these things just by looking, you have simply closed your eyes to the realities of our world.
Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.
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