To be human we need to experience the end of the world. We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is. Without that, we know nothing about the mortality and immortality that we carry. We don’t know that we’re alive as long as we haven’t encountered death: these are the banalities that have been erased. And it is an act of grace.
When governing is lackluster, the people are simple and honest. When governing is scrutinizing, the people are shrewd and crafty.
A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty — man who is supremely afraid of uncertainty, and who is forever hiding himself behind this or the other dogma. More briefly, the business of philosophy is not to reassure people, but to upset them.
Freedoers are at a disadvantage compared to freethinkers because people suffer more obviously from the consequences of deeds than from those of thoughts.
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
Logic may indeed be unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.
Often it is only when we suppress the question “Why?” that we become aware of those important facts, which then, in the course of our investigations, lead to an answer.
Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
My acts are irrevocable because they have no essence. If they had an essence, they would be permanent. No one could have performed them.
No man can be trusted with unlimited authority.
If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself.
It doesn’t bother you that you weigh only x or y pounds and not three hundred. Why should it bother you that you have only x or y years to live and not more? You accept limits placed on your body. Accept those placed on your time.
The inherent tendency of the State is to concentrate, to narrow, and monopolize all social activities; the nature of revolution is, on the contrary, to grow, to broaden, and disseminate itself in ever-wider circles. In other words, the State is institutional and static; revolution is fluent, dynamic.
The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.