Belief

"Years ago recruitment for cultic groups was far more obvious than today because extreme religious groups were easy to identify. They lived isolated from the general population, and the public had become aware of their deceptive recruiting techniques. Today many are attracted to organizations that are less overtly cultic, not overtly religious, and are often linked with the human potential movement, while others operate as businesses, with their tactics focused around financial success."

"Another potent element of the new cult milieu was the therapy sect, which offered believers the chance to achieve their full human potential through personal growth and self-actualization by taking total responsibility for one's actions."

"Another term coined by Haack is Psychokulte (therapy cults), of which he distinguished two kinds: those with techniques which promise self-discovery or self-realization and establishments with therapies (Therapie-Institutionene)—Heelas's 'self-religions'. The followers of both types show the effects of Psychomutation, a distinct personality change (Haack, 1990a:191). Schneider (1995:189–190) lists organizations, such as Landmark Education, Verein zur Förderung der Psychologischen Menschenkenntnis (VPM), Scientology/Dianetics, Ontologische Einweihungsschule (Hannes Scholl), EAP and Die Bewegung (Silo) as examples of 'therapy cults'. These groups do not immediately suggest religion of Weltanschauung, but reveal ideological and religious elements on closer inspection. Their slogans are 'We have the saving principle' or 'We enable those who are able' and they offer Lebenshilfe (advice on how to live). Such advice is a commodity which is sold in very expensive seminars. The ideologies involved often lie in the grey areas between the humanities, psychotherapies, Lebenshilfe, 'mental hygiene' (Psychohygiene), and religion."

"There was nothing special about our time with Andrew. We've been members in just another cultish group that make its members feel special. Our experiences are fundamentally no different from countless others in spiritual and political groups. We see clearly that corruption is difficult to avoid when a charismatic individual is given absolute power over a group of followers. All authoritarian groups have more or less the same dynamic. The emphasis on surrender, the initial happiness of merging into something bigger, the dogmatism, the rules and regulations, the suppression of doubts, it's the same everywhere."

"Religion, cult, there's no real definition of which is which. It's more like, 'if the shoe fits'. I personally define a 'cult' as any religion with fewer followers than has on Twitter. Also, Mormonism is secretive, and that's another trait I associate with cults. Catholics own their crazy. It's right on the table. Mormons are more like Fight Club."

"If Jones' People's Temple wasn't a cult, then the term has no meaning."

"The difference between a cult and an established religion is sometimes about one generation."

"After a decade of activity, the anti-cult movement had one significant accomplishment to its credit. It had succeeded in creating a pervasive negative image of the new religions and spreading a popular public prejudice against several groups which had become well known as "cults." However, it proved incapable of implementing any of its major program goals, which sought to severely regulate, inhibit the growth of, and eventually eliminate the cults altogether."

"It is important to realize that cults are a dime a dozen and that a great many businesses are cults."

"Outsiders often criticize the extreme commitment of group members. But what is really happening is that leader and followers are conspiring to realize a vision that is falsified daily. For the cult is not paradise, and the leader is not God. Hence the follower is embattled; to squarely confront the many failings of the leader and the group is to call into question one's own great work. Only by daily recommitting himself can the follower continue to work toward his ultimate goal. Each follower works out a secret compromise, acknowledging some things while denying or distorting others. Clearly this is a high-risk strategy that may go awry."

"I do not want this material to be considered any sort of mumbo jumbo. It is not a cult in the terms people often consider material that seems to come from a source beyond the individual who gives it. The designations spirit, and medium, and so forth, are ridiculous to begin with. You are simply using your inner senses. These senses are not magical, they certainly are not religious in any sense of the word, and I am not some degenerated secondary personality of Ruburt's. Nor will I be compared with some long-bearded, beady-eyed spirit sitting on cloud nine."

"Whenever there is an absolute truth at stake, the manners become careless. This applies both to the owners as well as their opponents of that truth and to all people involved."

"Cult leaders succeed in dominating their followers because they have mastered the cruel art of exploiting universal human dependency and attachment needs in others."

"Some of these terms, including "cult" and "sect," have long traditions of use, stretching back to the centuries when Latin was the official language of scholars. But the meanings of words often change over time; and terms that once were neutral or simply descriptive sometimes take on harshly negative implications and potentially lose their original usefulness, including the two just mentioned. Other terms have been coined more recently to circumvent the stereotypes associated with older categories. Among this newer terminology are "outsider groups" and "New Religious Movements." Sometimes the newer nomenclature is useful despite certain limitations. "Marginal religious communities," for example, is a positional designation — not a qualitative judgment — implying a location on the margin or edge of mainstream religious groups. When using these terms, it is important to recognize that they are often loaded with powerful assumptions and implications."

"Cosmotheism - An all encompassing worldview for White Europeans around the globe."

"Cosmotheism is a religion which positively asserts there is an internal meaning and purpose in life and in the cosmos. There is an essential unity, or consciousness that binds all living beings and all of the inorganic cosmos, as one. And what our true identity is this: we are the cosmos, made self-aware and self-conscious by evolution. Our undeniable human purpose, is to know and to complete ourselves as conscious individuals, and also as a self-aware species, and thereby to co-evolve with the cosmos towards total and universal awareness, and towards the ever-higher perfection of consciousness and being."

"Although an older edition of Webster's dictionary defines 'cosmotheism' as synonymous with pantheism, the term has taken on certain connotations in modern usage, owing chiefly to its use by Dr. William Pierce to describe his racially-hierarchical system of thought. Cosmotheism as it appears today, promoted chiefly on the internet, is widely considered to be a racist ideology which has appropriated the terminology of pantheism in order to legitimize itself."

"There is an increasing number of White Supremacist hate groups who try to leap onto the fashionable bandwagon of eco-spirituality in order to recruit members for their own warped ideology."

"We cannot cast a magic spell to make the nasties go away. It is even questionable from a democratic point of view whether ‘making them go away’ would be desirable. However, we should be alert and try to ‘ban’ these sort of nazi-characters from our own Internet pages and discussion forums. We should inform those new to Pantheism that the large majority of Pantheism is in fact benevolent and that these hate-groups luckily form a tiny, but loud, minority. Let’s make sure they stay that way."

"Neo-nazis try to infiltrate all sorts of religions and philosophies in order to recruit. We are not the only victims in their book. Nonetheless, their presence is a blemish on the blossom of Pantheism. But the blossom in itself is still as radiant as ever. Don’t be deterred from Pantheism because of a few hate-filled fringe groups."

"Some Vietnam veterans have told me what they did over there when they were animals. They have been giving testimony about it to the public, to juries, to judges. Some of the juries cry, and so do some of the judges... It's a rotten thing to brainwash someone into doing the dirty part of killing while we stay at home. It's a rotten thing to pretend the war is coming to an end when it's only taken to the air. And in 1972 if you don't fight against a rotten thing you become a part of it."

"As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell him nothing, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. ...he will refuse to believe it... That's the tragedy of the situation of demoralization."

"... “brainwashing” [is] a word-for-word translation from xi-nao, the Mandarin words for wash (xi) and brain (nao)... The process was meant to “change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet—a human robot—without the atrocity being visible from the outside.”"

"The idea of mind control flourished in pop culture, with movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Manchurian Candidate showing people whose minds were wiped and controlled by outside forces...By 1980 even the American Psychiatric Association had given it credence, including brainwashing under “dissociative disorders” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-III."

"Had Chinese and Soviet Communists really uncovered a machine or method to rewrite men’s minds and supplant their free will? The short answer is no—but that didn’t stop the U.S. from pouring resources into combatting it."

"Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business."

"There is perhaps a fifth category, which may belong under "insane" but which can be more sympathetically characterized by a word like tormented, bullied, or brainwashed. Sincere people who are not ignorant, not stupid, and not wicked can be cruelly torn, almost in two, between the massive evidence of science on the one hand, and their understanding of what their holy book tells them on the other."

"If you insert electrodes directly into the brains of cats and apes, they will behave like electronic toys. A whole series of motor functions can be triggered based on which button the experimenter pushes. This applies to all body parts: front and back paws, the tail, the hind parts, the head, and the ears."

"Stimulation of different points in the amygdala and hippocampus in the four patients produced a variety of effects, including pleasant sensations, elation, deep, thoughtful concentration, odd feelings, super relaxation, colored visions, and other responses."

"The radio stimulated bulls underscore the classic symbolism of the bullfighting, that is -- the triumph of intelligence over brute force, the supremacy of skill and grace over aggression and ferocity. The radio directed bulls also teach us that ancestral instincts of attack and destruction can be pacified by technology and human intelligence, giving a hope of peace that perhaps could benefit future humanity."

"We knew too little about the brain. It is much too complicated to be controlled. We never knew which parts of the brain we were stimulating with the stimoceiver. We didn’t even manage to prevent epileptic attacks, which we thought would be the simplest of things. We never found the area where epilepsy attacks originate."

"I had different views in the '70s. As a human being, I've learned… I have more culture now. I was dumb as a rock when I wrote 'Okie from Muskogee'... My views on marijuana have totally changed. I think we were brainwashed and I think anybody that doesn't know that needs to get up and read and look around, get their own information. It's a cooperative government project to make us think marijuana should be outlawed."

"... the term was based on the Chinese phrase ‘hsi nao’, meaning ‘to cleanse the mind’, and that this was not an official Communist phrase (it does not appear in Chinese dictionaries or newspapers) but was nevertheless said, on record, by Hunter’s Chinese informants. As Hunter would explain, ‘hsi nao’ was a clever pun on a longstanding Confucian principle, ‘hsi hsin’, to wash the heart, a metaphor that meant to prepare oneself for a quiet retirement from world affairs."

"Brainwashing is a system of befogging the brain so a person can be seduced into acceptance of what otherwise would be abhorrent to him. He loses touch with reality. Facts and fancy whirl round and change places … However, in order to prevent people from recognizing the inherent evils in brainwashing, the Reds pretend that it is only another name for something already very familiar and of unquestioned respect, such as education or reform."

"The American Psychological Association had rejected the brainwashing/mind control theories in 1987 insofar as they applied to religious movements, on the basis that they were not scientific is, therefore, perfectly accurate. It is, in fact, almost identical to [Margaret] Singer’s own statement that the rejection of the DIMPAC report was “described by the APA as a rejection of the scientific validity of the theory of coercive persuasion."

"Social scientists need not alter their definition of brainwashing, but should simply acknowledge that at least one contemporary ideological organization utilizes brainwashing in an attempt to retain its members. While this study cannot answer crucial questions about the long term implications for people who have been through this particular brainwashing program (compare Schein, 1961: 284), no doubt exists that Scientology's founder gave considerable thought to brainwashing techniques and imposed them on those of his followers whom he believed were harbouring thoughts or performing actions against him or the organization. The "brainwashing" term, therefore, has validity within some social science discourse."

"If someone took control of your mind and you were not able to think as yourself any longer, you would no longer be yourself. You'd be something in his command. You as an individual would be dead. That's Anti-Life. In other words, if you gave yourself to some cause, and gave up everything as an individual and you were at the beck and call of some leader, you would be dead as an individual. And that's what Darkseid wants. He wants control of everybody. If it was snowing outside and you weren't wearing any shoes and it was 38 degrees below zero and this guy says, "Go out and get me a bologna sandwich," you have to go through all that; you obey him automatically, you obey him meekly. You walk out without a coat and you freeze to death. He doesn't care. You do it anyway despite the fact that you don't want to do it. You're dead as an individual. You have no choice. You can't object and you have no stature as a person. You're dead. A slave is a dead man."

"Behind this web of semantic.(and more than semantic) confusion [regarding the definition of thought reform] lies an image of "brainwashing" as an all-powerful, irresistible, unfathomable, and magical method of achieving total control over the human mind. It is of course none of these things, and this loose usage makes the word a rallying point for fear, resentment, urges toward submission, justification for failure, irresponsible accusation, and for a wide gamut of emotional extremism."

"Here, then, is the brief history of brainwashing. The concept began as an [[Orientalism|[O]rientalist]] propaganda fiction created by the CIA to mobilize domestic support for a massive military build-up."

"Definition of brainwashing 1: a forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up basic political, social, or religious beliefs and attitudes and to accept contrasting regimented ideas 2: persuasion by propaganda or salesmanship"

"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened — that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death? And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'. The past, he reflected, had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed. For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?"

"The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left."

"Brainwashing: (a.k.a. thought control, mind control, coercive persuasion). A non-violent method that uses mind control techniques to convince a person to abandon some of their basic beliefs and adopt the beliefs of the indoctrinator."

"Brainwashing is defined as an observable set of transactions between a charismatically-structured collectivity and an isolated agent of the collectivity with the goal of transforming the agent into a deployable agent. Brainwashing is thus a process of ideological resocialization carried out within a structure of charismatic authority."

"Given the problematic nature of scientific support for brainwashing based theories as they are applied to participants in new religions, it is reasonable to ask why such evidence was ever admitted [into court testimony], and why it is sometimes still admitted. The most plausible answer has to do with the operation of biases, prejudices, and misinformation in these cases that involve controversial parties and issues or, as Kassin and Wrightsman (1988) say: cases involving emotional topics over which public opinion is polarized."

"Thought reform contains elements which are evident in Chinese culture (emphasis on interpersonal sensitivity, learning by rote and self-cultivation); in methods of extracting confessions well known in the Papal Inquisition (13th century) and elaborated through the centuries, especially by the Russian secret police; in methods of organizing corrective prisons, mental hospitals and other institutions for producing value change; in methods used by religious sects, fraternal orders, political elites or primitive societies for converting or initiating new members. Thought reform techniques are consistent with psychological principles but were not explicitly derived from such principles."

"The capture of American GIs in the Korean War heightened the alarm. Stories coming out of Korea suggested that the Chinese and Korean communists had developed techniques of indoctrination which nobody could resist. US soldiers and airmen had allegedly been turned into fervent communists. This process became known as brainwashing. Panic gripped the popular press. Perhaps such POWs, when liberated, might return home as clandestine subversives. It was years before brainwashing was shown to be a fantasy. When captives, brutalised by torture and malnutrition, professed adherence to Marxism-Leninism they were usually calculating that a pretence of ideological conversion would stop their torment."

"An estimated 5,000 economic, political, and religious groups operate in the United States alone at any given time, with 2.5 million members. Over the last ten years, cults have used tactics of coercive mind control to negatively impact an estimated 20 million victims in the last ten years. Worldwide figures are even greater."

"Human beings have been trying to change each others' minds since they first discovered they had them. Brainwashing is more ambitious, and more coercive, than simple persuasion, and unlike older cognates such as indoctrination, it has become closely associated with modern, mechanistic technology. It is a systematic processing of non-compliant human beings which, if successful, refashions their very identities."

"Brainwashing threatens cherished notions of free will. It seems to suggest that we may not be safe anywhere, not even inside our own skulls. Since Korea it has been invoked whenever people do something especially incomprehensible."

"Say the word "brainwashing", and chances are we think of the Manchurian Candidate, of some mysterious process that installs malevolent new beliefs in people's minds - as if ideologies were just like versions of Windows...But brains are not computers, and there is no Button X that Osama and his ilk can press to turn a man from good to evil. Giving a name to the pathway from "normal" to "killer" may make us feel better, but it doesn't help us prevent any future bombings."

"One striking fact about brainwashing is its consistency. Whether the context is a prisoner-of-war camp, a cult's headquarters or a radical mosque, five core techniques keep cropping up: isolation, control, uncertainty, repetition and emotional manipulation."

"The persuasive techniques used by totalist cults to bind and exploit the members, while not magical or infallible, are sufficiently powerful and effective to assure the recruitment of a significant percentage of those approached, and the retention of a significant percentage of those enlisted."

"Mind control is the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or distort perception, motivation, affect, cognition and/or behavioral outcomes. It is neither magical nor mystical, but a process that involves a set of basic social psychological principles. … It seems to me that at the very heart of the controversy over the existence of mind control is a bias toward believing in the power of people to resist the power of situational forces, a belief in individual will power and faith to overcome all evil adversity. It is Jesus modeling resistance against the temptations of Satan, and not the vulnerability of Adam and Eve to deception. More recently, examples abound that challenge this person-power misattribution."

"A western citizen is being brainwashed much more than a soviet citizen ever was during the era of communist propaganda. In ideology, the main thing is not the ideas, but rather the mechanisms of their distribution. The might of the Western media, for example, is incomparably greater than that of the propaganda mechanisms of the Vatican when it was at the zenith of its power. And it is not only the cinema, literature, philosophy – all the levers of influence and mechanisms used in the promulgation of culture, in its broadest sense, work in this direction. At the slightest impulse all who work in this area respond with such consistency that it is hard not to think that all orders come from a single source of power."

"lack of religion (either due to a lack of information about religion or to lack of belief in it)"

"hostility to religion"

"behaving in such a way that fails to live up to one's religious tenets"

"The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: Those with brains, but no religion, And those with religion, but no brains."

"I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him against the liberty of his fellow-men."

"All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete possession of their intellectual powers."

"You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?"

"If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle."

"IRRELIGION, n. The principal one of the great faiths of the world."

"It's a big question. Getting rid of religion would be a good start, wouldn't it? It seems to be causing a lot of havoc."

"Maybe you've put your faith in spiritual claptrap because our random, narrative-free universe terrifies you. But that's no solution. If you want comforting, suck your thumb. Buy a pillow. Don't make up a load of floaty blah about energy or destiny. This is the real world, stupid. We should be solving problems, not sticking our fingers in our ears and singing about fairies."

"It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma, or want of dogma, that the danger lies."

"Atheism is a non-prophet organization."

"Religion claims to be in possession of an absolute truth; but its history is a history of errors and heresies. It gives us the promise and prospect of a transcendent world — far beyond the limits of our human experience — and it remains human, all too human."

"Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses."

"When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled."

"A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it."

"Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. [...] If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity."

"Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires."

"Can you hate something you don't believe in? And yet he called himself a free-thinker. What an impossible paradox, to be free and to be so obsessed."

"Die Irreligiösen sind religiöser als sie selbst wissen, und die Religiösen sind's weniger, als sie meinen."

"I don't care what the priests say. I think we should do as we feel."

"When I came here, I put my hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. I didn't put my hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible."

"History does not record anywhere a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help."

"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics."

"The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history."

"Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist."

"Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe."

"The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight."

"Notre Père qui êtes aux cieux Restez-y Et nous, nous resterons sur la terre qui est quelques fois si jolie."

"I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue."

"I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion is anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it."

"Do you know what the definition of a terrorist is? Some definitions say terrorists use violence, but it can also be the threatened use of violence for the purpose of creating fear in order to achieve a religious goal. This is exactly what [evangelists do], they put the fear of God and Hell into nonbelievers. What could be more terroristic than 'Believe this or burn for an eternity,' the answer is nothing."

"Religion IS a force for good when you take out the murder, mass genocide (committed by God as documented in the Bible), religious wars, burning witches at the stake, Ted Haggard, shooting abortion doctors, the Bible's promotion of slavery, pedophile priests, serial killing Christians gone wild, the churches' systematic oppression of women and minorities, aversion to protection against STDs and the spread of AIDS in 3rd world countries, creative and inconsistent interpretation of 'thou shalt not kill', take it all out and religion is a force for good."

"On June 22nd [1633], in the morning, in the great hall of the Convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Galileo was found guilty of holding a false doctrine. He went down on his knees and both abjured and condemned his own errors. He swore never to argue such doctrines again. It was thus definitely confirmed that the sun did rotate around the earth... Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. Saint Mary Over Minerva. Power over wisdom."

"You don't have to believe in atheism, because atheism is based on REASON."

"I see little divinity about them or you. You talk to me of Christianity when you are in the act of hanging your enemies. Was there ever such blasphemous nonsense!"

"Weyoun: Pagh wraiths, prophets — all this talk of gods strikes me as nothing more than superstitious nonsense. Damar: You believe the Founders are gods, don't you? Weyoun: That's different. Damar: In what way?' Weyoun: The Founders are gods."

"Quark: There's a Bajoran convention on the station I didn't know about? Thanks, Odo. I need to call in more dabo girls. Odo: It's not a convention. They're from an orthodox spiritual order coming to support Vedek Winn's efforts to keep the Bajoran children out of school. Quark: Orthodox? In that case I'll need twice as many dabo girls."

"As everybody's god, what will you do?" the doctor demanded. "You mean immediately?" asked the small god. "I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that will inevitably be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay … "… Also, I will be capricious. I'll reward and punish arbitrarily. I'll peek through bedroom windows and admonish what I see there, sometimes one thing, sometimes the opposite. I will have purposes men know nothing of, and when men begin to catch on to them, I will change them. This will convince some of your people that I am unreliable. "… Occasionally, I will do a conspicuous miracle to save one dying child while a thousand children starve elsewhere. This will convince sensible people I am perverse, and they will curse my name… "… I will be a sham, but not a snob. I will let every man, woman, or child, no matter how greedy or wicked, claim to have a personal relationship with me. In other words, I will be as arbitrary, inconsistent, ignorant, pushy, and common as humans are, and what more have they ever wanted in a god?"

"Be comforted that we have each other to depend on! When waters rise and swallow crops, we count on one another to plant those crops again, to rebuild homes, to care for our sick! Some blame God and demand we make sacrifice to Him. If your village was being flooded would you, Erasmus, butcher your daughters like Abraham tried with Isaac, because some priest told you God demanded it? Or would you try to build canals to divert the water, understanding that there is a mechanism to why floods happen and no God has anything to do with it?"

"The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning."

"Religions die when they are proven to be true. Science is the record of dead religions."

"Christians are generally creepy people as a direct result of the dysfunctional dynamic of worshipping a dead naked hippie."

"To remember that once we were near the salvation of Christ, so near that our right hand might have touched and taken it, and after all that hand was withheld; this is a memory which will enhance remorse forever."

"We do not desire that the unanimity of a jury should be the result of anything but the unanimity of conviction. It is true that a single juryman, or two or three constituting a small minority, may, if their own convictions are not strong and deeply rooted, think themselves justified in giving way to the majority. If is very true, if jurymen have only doubts or weak convictions, they may yield to the stronger and more determined view of their fellows; but I hold it to be of the essence of a juryman's duty, if he has a firm and deeply rooted conviction, either in the affirmative or the negative of the issue he has to try, not to give up that conviction, although the majority may be against him, from any desire to purchase his freedom from confinement or constraint, or the various other inconveniences to which jurors are subject."

"It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium."

"No man ever truly believed, who was not first made sensible of unbelief. True conviction of sin — how difficult it is, when its appearances and modes of life are so fair, when it twines itself so cunningly about, or creeps so insidiously into, our amiable qualities, and sets off its internal disorders by so many outward charms and attractions."

"In immediate feeling, one human being never understands the other. As soon as something happens to him personally, he understands everything differently. When he himself is suffering, he does not understand another’s suffering, and when he himself is happy he still does not understand it. Immediate feeling selfishly understands everything in relation to itself and therefore is in the disunion of double-mindedness with all others, because there can be unity only in the soundly understood equality of sincerity, and in selfish shortsightedness his conviction is continually being changed, or it is chance that it is not changed, since the reason for this is that by chance his life is not touched by any change. But such firmness of conviction is a delusion on the part of the pampered, because a conviction is not firm when everything forces it upon one, as it were, and makes it firm, but its firmness manifests itself in the ups and downs of everything. Rarely, indeed, does a person’s life avoid all changes, and in the changes the conviction of immediate feeling is a delusion, the momentary impression blown up into a view of life as a whole."

"Ninety-five per cent of modern people have no ideas or convictions of their own. Five per cent have views and convictions but again ninety-five per cent of these do not dare to stand up for them. There are five per cent of five per cent who have courage and convictions. These make history for good or evil."

"I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect them. Things in possession have a very firm grip. One of the strongest cements of society is the conviction of mankind that the state of things into which they are born is a part of the order of the universe, as natural, let us say, as that the sun should go round the earth. It is a conviction that they will not surrender except on compulsion, and a wise society should look to it that this compulsion be not put upon them. For the individual man there is no radical cure, outside of human nature itself, for the evils to which human nature is heir."

"Es ist nicht der Kampf der Meinungen, welcher die Geschichte so gewaltthätig gemacht hat, sondern der Kampf des Glaubens an die Meinungen, das heisst der Ueberzeugungen."

"Whether anybody comes to convince me or not a part of my life does always ache arresting my chest."

"It is no certain evidence, that because the conscience feels the weight of sin, the heart is humbled on account of it; that because the conscience approves of the rectitude of the Divine justice, the heart bows to the Divine sovereignty. The most powerful conviction of sin, therefore, is not conclusive evidence of Christian character."

"The most human thing about anyone is a thing he learns and … and earns. It’s a thing he can’t have when he’s very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it’s truly part of him as long as he lives."

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."

"Conviction, it turns out, is a luxury of those standing on the sidelines."

"Prior to the 17th century the terms ["deism" and "deist"] were used interchangeably with the terms "theism" and "theist", respectively. … Theologians and philosophers of the seventeenth century began to give a different signification to the words.... Both [theists and deists] asserted belief in one supreme God, the Creator.... and agreed that God is personal and distinct from the world. But the theist taught that god remained actively interested in and operative in the world which he had made, whereas the deist maintained that God endowed the world at creation with self-sustaining and self-acting powers and then abandoned it to the operation of these powers acting as second causes."

"There are many who confess that while they believe like the Turks and the Jews that there is some sort of God and some sort of deity, yet with regard to Jesus Christ and to all that to which the doctrine of the Evangelists and the Apostles testify, they take all that to be fables and dreams.... I have heard that there are of this band those who call themselves Deists, an entirely new word, which they want to oppose to Atheist. For in that atheist signifies a person who is without God, they want to make it understood that they are not at all without God, since they certainly believe there is some sort of God, whom they even recognize as creator of heaven and earth, as do the Turks; but as for Jesus Christ, they only know that he is and hold nothing concerning him nor his doctrine."

"I have generally been denominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious I am no Christian, except mere infant baptism make me one; and as to being a Deist, I know not, strictly speaking, whether I am one or not, for I have never read their writings; mine will therefore determine the matter; for I have not in the least disguised my sentiments, but have written freely without any conscious knowledge of prejudice for, or against any man, sectary or party whatever; but wish that good sense, truth and virtue may be promoted and flourish in the world, to the detection of delusion, superstition, and false religion; and therefore my errors in the succeeding treatise, which may be rationally pointed out, will be readily rescinded."

"Let reason count the stars, weigh the mountains, fathom the depths — the employment becomes her, and the success is glorious. But when the question is, "How shall man be just with God?" reason must be silent, revelation must speak; and he who will not hear it assimilates himself to the first deist, Cain; he may not kill a brother, he certainly destroys himself."

"As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me as a species of Atheism — a sort of religious denial of God. It professes to believe in a man rather than in God. It is a compound made up chiefly of Manism with but little Deism, and is as near to Atheism as twilight is to darkness. It introduces between man and his Maker an opaque body, which it calls a Redeemer, as the moon introduces her opaque self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this means a religious, or an irreligious, eclipse of light. It has put the whole orbit of reason into shade."

"My parents had early given me religious impressions, and brought me through my childhood piously in the Dissenting way. But I was scarce fifteen, when, after doubting by turns of several points, as I found them disputed in the different books I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself. Some books against Deism fell into my hands; they were said to be the substance of sermons preached at Boyle's Lectures. It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist."

"[T]he Rev. R. Taylor, A.M., the Deist, now in gaol, infamously persecuted by the Whigs for his religious opinions, in his learned defense of Deism called the Diegesis, has clearly proved all the heirarchical institutions of the Christians to be a close copy of those of the Essenians of Egypt."

"Just as AR [absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others] is the whole positive content of perfection, so CW, or the conception of the Creator-and-the-Whole-of-what-he-has-created as constituting one life, the super-whole which in its everlasting essence is uncreated (and does not necessitate just the parts which the whole has) but in its de facto concreteness is created - this panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations. Thus ARCW, or absolute-relative panentheism, is the one doctrine that really states the whole of what all theists, if not all atheists as/well, are implicitly talking about."

"Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism."

"Who ever heard of a devout deist? Who ever heard of one who was willing to spend his life in missionary labor for the good of others? It is not according to the constitution of the mind that such a system should awaken the affections. And what is true of this system is true of every false system. All such systems leave the heart cold, and, accordingly, exert very little genuine, transforming power over the life."

"There is probably no argument by which the case for theism, or for, deism, or for pantheism in either its pancosmic or acosmic form, can be convincingly proved."

"A less important point which needs to be made in this piece is that although the index of The God Delusion notes six references to Deism it provides no definition of the word ‘deism’. This enables Dawkins in his references to Deism to suggest that Deists are a miscellany of believers in this and that. The truth, which Dawkins ought to have learned before this book went to the printers, is that Deists believe in the existence of a God but not the God of any revelation. In fact the first notable public appearance of the notion of Deism was in the American Revolution."

"Some will say Thomas Jefferson was a deist, not an atheist. Atheism, however, simply involves having no theism, and deism — belief that a celestial Clockmaker wound up the universe and set it ticking — is too watery a theism to count. Any religion worthy of the name explains, enjoins and consoles; undemanding deism merely explains, and does this minimally."

"The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract."

"The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority."

"Underlying the concept of positivity is the conviction that the positive is intrinsically positive in itself, without anyone pausing to ask what is to be regarded as positive. ... It is significant and really quite interesting that the term 'positive' actually contains this ambivalence. On the one hand, 'positive' means what is given, is postulated, is there—as when we speak of positivism as the philosophy that sticks to the facts. But, equally, 'positive' also refers to the good, the approvable, in a certain sense, the ideal. And I imagine that this semantic constellation expresses with precision what countless people actually feel to be the case."

"The restriction of rationality to the use of means which is legitimized by this view [positivism], entails that the other aspect of the practical problematic, the realm of ends, falls prey to pure decisionism, the whim of mere decisions not reflected upon by reason. The decisionism of unreflected, arbitrary decisions in the realm of practice corresponds to the positivism implied by the restriction to pure value-free theories in the realm of cognition."

"The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth."

"The simple-minded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only excludes all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts."

"What is metaphysics? Let us explain clearly: if by metaphysics, in the broadest sense of the word, we mean “the general theory of the universe”, that theory which, in other words, embraces and explains all its manifestations, then positivism, which proclaims itself to be the negator and destroyer of metaphysics, has itself created a complete and proper metaphysics."

"Positivism and ordinary language analysis … repel students who come with the humanizing questions. Professors of these schools simply would not and could not talk about anything important, and they themselves do not represent a philosophic life for the students."

"Whatever the deity which satisfied Arnold's personal experience may have been, the religion which he gives us in Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible is neither Deism nor bare Pan-Deism, but a diluted Positivism. As an ethical system it is in theory admirable, but its positive value is in the highest degree questionable. Pascal's judgment upon the God who emerged from the philosophical investigations of Rene Descartes was that He was a God who was unnecessary. And one may with even greater truth say that the man who is able to receive and live by the religion which Arnold offers him is no longer in need of its help and stimulus. To be able to appreciate an ethical idealism a man must himself be already an ethical idealist."

"If the positivist model of scientific knowledge is false, does it mean that the only cure is a thoroughgoing relativism? For the record, positivism is not the only game in town in the natural or social sciences. It is not the only conception of science. Marx's critique of bourgeois philosophy, political economy, and utopian socialism is the first stage leading to the affirmation of a dialectical materialist conception of science. Marx's rejection of empiricism, as the epistemological basis for science, is fundamentally a discarding of the empiricist premise—that science is exclusively descriptive and devoid of prescriptive tasks. The concepts of exploitation, class struggle, and the theory of reification, for example, possess both a descriptive and normative (critical) aspect for Marx. After all, Marx made it very plain: Capital is A Critique of Political Economy. Hence, Hume's fork has no place at a Marxist dinner table."

"Two aspects of this older positivist view ... lack validity and impede understanding: ... the notion of a timeless based on rigorously objective observation and logic, and ... that earlier systems were either theory-free or theory-poor because explanation can only follow accurate description."

"If what we regard as real depends on our theory, how can we make reality the basis of our philosophy? I would say that I am a realist in the sense that I think there is a universe out there waiting to be investigated and understood. I regard the solipsist position that everything is the creation of our imagination as a waste of time. No one acts on that basis. But we cannot distinguish what is real about the universe without a theory. I therefore take the view, which has been described as simple-minded or naive, that a theory of physics is just a mathematical model that we use to describe the results of observations. A theory is a good theory if it is an elegant model, if it describes a wide class of observations, and if it predicts the results of new observations. Beyond that, it makes no sense to ask if it corresponds to reality, because we do not know what reality is independent of a theory. This view of scientific theories may make me an instrumentalist or a positivist --- as I have said above, I have been called both. The person who called me a positivist went on to add that everyone knew that positivism was out of date --- another case of refutation by denigration. It may indeed be out of date in that it was yesterday's intellectual fad, but the positivist position I have outlined seems the only possible one for someone who is seeking new laws, and new ways, to describe the universe. It is no good appealing to reality because we don't have a model-independent concept of reality."

"Then philosophy was supposed to be the handmaiden of theology, humbly accepting its achievements, and asked to bring them into a clean logical order and present them in a plausible, conceptually demonstrable context. Now, philosophy is supposed to be the handmaiden of the other sciences. … Its task is to demonstrate the methods of the sciences."

"Was vernünftig ist, das ist Wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig."

"In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the intellectual world."

"Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry."

"With the clean separation between science and poetry the division of labor which science had helped to establish was extended to language. For science the word is first of all a sign; it is then distributed among the various arts as sound, image, or word proper, but its unity can never be restored by the addition of these arts, be synaesthesia or total art. As sign, language must resign itself to calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it. As image it must resign itself to being a likeness and, to be entirely nature, must renounce the claim to know it."

"The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics."

"For positivism, which has assumed the judicial office of enlightened reason, to speculate about intelligible worlds is no longer merely forbidden but senseless prattle. Positivism—fortunately for it—does not need to be atheistic, since objectified thought cannot even pose the question of the existence of God. The positivist censor turns a blind eye to official worship, as a special, knowledge-free zone of social activity, just as willingly as to art—but never to denial, even when it has a claim to be knowledge. For the scientific temper, any deviation of thought from the business of manipulating the actual, any stepping outside the jurisdiction of existence, is no less senseless and self-destructive than it would be for the magician to step outside the magic circle drawn for his incantation; and in both cases violation of the taboo carries a heavy price for the offender."

"If organized science had completely yielded to the Nordic requirements, and had accordingly crystallized a consistent methodology, positivism would eventually have had to accept it, just as elsewhere it has accepted the patterns of empirical sociology shaped by administrative needs and conventional restrictions."

"How is it possible to determine what justly may be called science and truth, if the determination itself presupposes the methods of achieving scientific truth? The same vicious circle is involved in any justification of scientific method by the observation of science. … Doubtless the logical fallacy at the very root of the positivist attitude merely betrays its worship of institutionalized science. … If science is to be the authority that stands firm against obscurantism, … philosophy must formulate the concept of science in a way that expresses human resistance to the threatening relapse into mythology and madness, rather than further such a relapse by formalizing science and conforming it to the requirements of the existing practice."

"The positivist command to conform to facts and common sense instead of to utopian ideas is not so different from the call to obey reality as interpreted by religious institutions, which after all are facts too."

"One voice in the Great Conversation itself announces this modern point of view. In the closing paragraph of his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume writes: "When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume … let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." …the positivists of our own day, would commit to burning or, what is the same, to dismissal from serious consideration... Those books... argue the case against the kind of positivism that asserts that everything except mathematics and experimental science is sophistry and illusion. ...The Great Conversation... contains both sides of the issue..."

"All of this positive [knowledge] fails to express the state of the knowing subject in existence, hence it pertains to a fictive objective subject, and to mistake oneself for such a subject is to be fooled and remain fooled."

"The radical empiricist onslaught … provides the methodological justification for the debunking of the mind by the intellectuals—a positivism which, in its denial of the transcending elements of Reason, forms the academic counterpart of the socially required behavior."

"Der Hautausschlag ist so positiv als die Haut."

"The intellectual origins of literary theory in Europe were, I think it is accurate to say, insurrectionary. The traditional university, the hegemony of determinism and positivism, the reification of ideological bourgeois “humanism,” the rigid barriers between academic specialties: it was powerful responses to all these that linked together such influential progenitors of today’s literary theorist as Saussure, Lukács, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. Theory proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that all the domains of human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity."

"The great shift … is the movement away from the value-laden languages of … the “humanities,” and toward the ostensibly value-neutral languages of the “sciences.” This attempt to escape from, or to deny, valuation is … especially important in psychology … and the so-called social sciences. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that the specialized languages of these disciplines serve virtually no other purpose than to conceal valuation behind an ostensibly scientific and therefore nonvaluational semantic screen."

"Despite its value to Einstein and Heisenberg, positivism has done as much harm as good. But, unlike the mechanical worldview, positivism has preserved its heroic aura, so that it survives to do damage in the future."

"Where then does this radical attack on the objectivity of scientific knowledge come from? One source I think is the old bugbear of positivism, this time applied to the study of science itself. If one refuses to talk about anything that is not directly observed, then quantum field theories or principles of symmetry or more generally laws of nature cannot be taken seriously. What philosophers and sociologists and anthropologists can study is the actual behavior of real scientists, and this behavior never follows any simple description in terms of rules of inference. But scientists have the direct experience of scientific theories as desired yet elusive goals, and they become convinced of the reality of these theories."

"A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes there is no virtue but on his own side."

"Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends."

"Every bigot was once a child without prejudice."

"Georgia has prospered because we have refused to be divided. We have worked together, and the nation and the world have taken notice. We are where we are today, the envy of other states, because decades ago our leaders accepted change while others defied it. In the long run, it has paid us handsome dividends. Today, the eyes of the nation and the world are on us again to see whether Georgia is still a leader or whether we will slip into the morass of past recriminations. I have heard all the reasons not to change the flag and adopt this compromise: "it will hurt me politically"; "this is how we can become a majority"; "this is our wedge issue"; "this is the way we use race to win." Using race to win leaves ashes in the mouths of the victors. If there is anything we should have learned from our history, it is that using racial bigotry for political advantage always backfires. Sometimes in the short run, sometimes in the long run. Often both. And if you allow yourself to be dragged along in its raging current even if only briefly, you will live the rest of your life regretting your mistake. I know."

"BIGOT, n. One who is obstinately and zealously attached to an opinion that you do not entertain."

"I believe very strongly that every person in the world is important and should not be treated differently based on race, gender, orientation, religious beliefs or otherwise."

"Some say it is unfair to hold disadvantaged children to rigorous standards. I say it is discrimination to require anything less–-the soft bigotry of low expectations."

"Let us teach our children, and all Americans, to rise above brutality and bigotry and to be champions of liberty, human dignity, and equality."

"I ask you to uphold the values of America, and remember why so many have come here. We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them. No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words because of their ethnic background or religious faith."

"The exercise of rights is ennobled by service and mercy and a heart for the weak. Liberty for all does not mean independence from one another. Our nation relies on men and women who look after a neighbor and surround the lost with love. Americans, at our best, value the life we see in one another and must always remember that even the unwanted have worth. And our country must abandon all the habits of racism because we cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time."

"God deliver us all from prejudice and unkindness, and fill us with the love of truth and virtue."

"I know a good many people, I think, who are bigots, and who know they are bigots, and are sorry for it, but they dare not be anything else."

"There is no tariff so injurious as that with which sectarian bigotry guards its commodities. It dwarfs the soul by shutting out truths from other continents of thought, and checks the circulation of its own."

"The difference between de jure and de facto segregation is the difference between open, forthright bigotry and the shamefaced kind that works through unwritten agreements between real estate dealers, school officials, and local politicians."

"The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less."

"Racism tends to attract attention when it's flagrant and filled with invective. But like all bigotry, the most potent component of racism is frame-flipping - positioning the bigot as the actual victim. So the gay do not simply want to marry; they want to convert our children into sin. The Jews do not merely want to be left in peace; they actually are plotting world take-over. And the blacks are not actually victims of American power, but beneficiaries of the war against hard-working whites. This is a respectable, more sensible, bigotry, one that does not seek to name-call, preferring instead change the subject and straw man. Thus segregation wasn't necessary to keep the niggers in line; it was necessary to protect the honor of white women."

"A man may die by a fever as well as by consumption, and religion is as effectually destroyed by bigotry as by indifference."

"We do not even inquire whether a black man is a rebel in arms or not; if he is black, be he friend or foe, he is thought best kept at a distance. It is hardly possible God will let us succeed while such enormities are practiced."

"I have no prejudice against sect or race, but want each individual to be judged by his own merit."

"τήν τε οἴησιν ἱερὰν νόσον ἔλεγε καὶ τὴν ὅρασιν ψεύδεσθαι. (Original: Greek)"

"κύνες γὰρ καὶ βαΰζουσιν ὃν, ἂν µὴ γινώσκωσι. (Original: Greek)"

"I made a comparison at table some time since, which has often been quoted, and received many compliments. It was that of the mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts."

"Acceptance is right. Kindness is right. Love is right. I pray, right now, that we're moving into a kinder time when prejudice is overcome by understanding; when narrow-mindedness, and narrow-minded bigotry is overwhelmed by open-hearted empathy; when the pain of judgmentalism is replaced by the purity of love."

"Knowing that religion does not furnish grosser bigots than law, I expect little from old judges."

"Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education & free discussion are the antidotes of both."

"When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force."

"Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood. This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spread all too easily to victimize the next minority group."

"The great danger facing us today is not so much the atomic bomb that was created by physical science. Not so much that atomic bomb that you can put in an aeroplane and drop on the heads of hundreds and thousands of people—as dangerous as that is. But the real danger confronting civilization today is that atomic bomb which lies in the hearts and souls of men, capable of exploding into the vilest of hate and into the most damaging selfishness—that's the atomic bomb that we've got to fear today."

"Some things are right and some things are wrong. Eternally so, absolutely so. It's wrong to hate. It always has been wrong and it always will be wrong. It's wrong in America, it's wrong in Germany, it's wrong in Russia, it's wrong in China. It was wrong in 2000 B.C., and it's wrong in 1954 A.D. It always has been wrong, and it always will be wrong. It's wrong to throw our lives away in riotous living. No matter if everybody in Detroit is doing it, it's wrong. It always will be wrong, and it always has been wrong. It's wrong in every age and it's wrong in every nation. Some things are right and some things are wrong, no matter if everybody is doing the contrary. Some things in this universe are absolute. The God of the universe has made it so. And so long as we adopt this relative attitude toward right and wrong, we're revolting against the very laws of God himself... My friends, that attitude is destroying the soul of our culture! It's destroying our nation! The thing that we need in the world today is a group of men and women who will stand up for right and to be opposed to wrong, wherever it is. A group of people who have come to see that some things are wrong, whether they're never caught up with. And some things are right, whether nobody sees you doing them or not."

"The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has been held by bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words and stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the right, and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me, for it is your duty to tolerate truth; but when I am the stronger, I shall persecute you, for it is my duty to persecute error."

"Ian: They're afraid of you because you're different from them. So whatever you do, it doesn't matter."

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

"All seems Infected that th' Infected spy, As all looks yellow to the Jaundic'd Eye."

"Since its inception, the Republican Party has stood for the worth of every person. On that ground, we support the pluralism and diversity that have been part of our country's greatness. Deep in our hearts, we do believe that bigotry has no place in American life. We denounce those persons, organizations, publications, and movements which practice or promote racism, antisemitism or religious intolerance."

"The protection of individual rights is the foundation for opportunity and security. The Republican Party is unique in this regard. Since its inception, it has respected every person, even when that proposition was not universally popular. Today, as in the day of Lincoln, we insist that no American's rights are negotiable. That is why we declare that bigotry and prejudice have no place in American life. We denounce all who practice or promote racism, antisemitism, or religious intolerance."

"We are the party of individual Americans, whose rights we protect and defend as the foundation for opportunity and security for all. Today, as at our founding in the day of Lincoln, we insist no one's rights are negotiable. As we strive to forge a national consensus on the divisive issues of our time, we call on all Republicans and all Americans to reject the forces of hatred and bigotry. Accordingly, we denounce all who practice or promote racism, antisemitism, ethnic prejudice, and religious intolerance."

"Equality of individuals before the law has always been a cornerstone of our party. We therefore oppose discrimination based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or national origin and will vigorously enforce anti-discrimination statutes. As we strive to forge a national consensus on the crucial issues of our time, we call on all Americans to reject the forces of hatred and bigotry. Accordingly, we denounce all who practice or promote racism, antisemitism, ethnic prejudice, and religious intolerance. Our country was founded in faith and upon the truth that self-government is rooted."

"Individual rights, and the responsibilities that go with them, are the foundation of a free society. From the time of Lincoln, equality of individuals has been a cornerstone of the Republican Party. Our commitment to equal opportunity extends from landmark school-choice legislation for the students of Washington, D.C. to historic appointments at the highest levels of government. We consider discrimination based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or national origin to be immoral, and we will strongly enforce anti-discrimination statutes. We ask all to join us in rejecting the forces of hatred and bigotry and in denouncing all who practice or promote racism, antisemitism, ethnic prejudice, or religious intolerance. As a matter of principle, Republicans oppose any attempts to create race-based governments within the United States, as well as any domestic governments not bound by the constitution or the Bill of Rights. Precisely because we oppose discrimination, we reject preferences, quotas, and set-asides, whether in education or in corporate boardrooms. The government should not make contracts on this basis, and neither should corporations."

"All Americans stand equal before the law. We embrace the principle that all Americans should be treated with respect and dignity. In the spirit of the constitution, we consider discrimination based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or national origin unacceptable and immoral. We will strongly enforce anti-discrimination statutes and ask all to join us in rejecting the forces of hatred and bigotry and in denouncing all who practice or promote racism, antisemitism, ethnic prejudice, or religious intolerance."

"We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions—bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality. Whoever seeks to set one nationality against another, seeks to degrade all nationalities. Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races. Whoever seeks to set one religion against another, seeks to destroy all religion."

"Bigotry is probably the thing I detest most. All forms of intolerance, the whole idea of “that which is different from me is necessary evil.” I really like to explore the idea that difference is equal and good. But there's another idea that I like to explore, too. Oppressed groups are not, generally speaking, people who stand firmly together – no, sadly, they kind of subdivide among themselves and fight like hell. That's human nature, so that's what you see here. This world of wizards and witches, they're already ostracized, and then within themselves, they've formed a loathsome pecking order."

"The medieval ecclesiastics, either through ignorance or bigotry, painted Muhammadanism in the darkest colours. They were in fact trained both to hate the man Muhammad and his religion. To them Muhammad was Anti-Christ. I have studied him — the wonderful man, and in my opinion far from being an Anti-Christ he must be called the Saviour of Humanity. I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much-needed peace and happiness."

"Hatred can never be good. … Here, and in what follows, I mean by hatred only hatred towards men. … Envy, derision, contempt, anger, revenge, and other emotions attributable to hatred, or arising therefrom, are bad … Whatsoever we desire from motives of hatred is base, and in a State unjust."

"Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand With a grip that kills it."

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness."

"I have no race prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse."

"The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

"We have abundant reason to rejoice, that, in this land, the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart. In this enlightened age, and in this land of equal liberty, it is our boast, that a man's religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining & holding the highest offices that are known in the United States."

"[N]othing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated."

"All men feel something of an honorable bigotry for the objects which have long continued to please them."

"The church has stood, a rock colossus of bigotry, in the path of ten thousand proposed reforms. Sane efforts to legalize birth control information, the manufacture of proper birth control appliances, appliances for the inhibition of the spread of venereal disease, public instruction in sex hygiene, free clinics for the treatment of venereal disease, the inspection and treatment of prostitutes, controlled prostitution itself, the publication of psychological and physical sex information, aid for unwed mothers—myriad attempts by sane men acting sanely on real problems—have been fought down by church-frightened legislatures and church-dominated courts."

"I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being, neither white, black, brown nor red. When you are dealing with humanity as one family, there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being, or one human being living around and with another human being."

"In the past, yes, I have made sweeping indictments of all white people. I will never be guilty of that again — as I know now that some white people are truly sincere, that some truly are capable of being brotherly toward a black man. The true Islam has shown me that a blanket indictment of all white people is as wrong as when whites make blanket indictments against blacks."

"DELUSION, n. The father of a most respectable family, comprising Enthusiasm, Affection, Self-denial, Faith, Hope, Charity and many other goodly sons and daughters."

"No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities."

"The easiest thing in the world is self-deceit; for every man believes what he wishes, though the reality is often different."

"A delusion, a mockery, and a snare."

"“Everybody, and I mean everybody, myself included, operates not out of a knowledge of what is, but out of a delusion of what they wish. It might be the most powerfully destructive force in the world.” “I follow you,” said Susan. “Think of all the players—the oil companies, the fracking outfits, the politicians, the voters, the farmers, the dreamers, oh, and the religious, definitely.”"

"If a man lives under the delusion that he can do anything that he likes, and that the effect of his actions will never recoil upon himself, he will most certainly find that some of these actions eventually involve him in unhappiness and suffering. If, again, he does not understand that the object of his life is progress, that God’s Will for him is that he shall grow to be something better and nobler than he is now, then also he will bring unhappiness and suffering upon himself"

"What the Buddhists teach is to free yourself from the three great evils in life: greed — which means all kinds of craving — hatred, and delusion. But delusion is really the cause of the other two. We crave that which we delude ourselves into thinking will bring happiness; we hate those whom we delude ourselves into thinking stand to stop us from getting it."

"It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth."

"Delusion will vanish as the light becomes more and more effulgent, load after load of ignorance will vanish, and then will come a time when all else has disappeared and the sun alone shines"

"We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog's yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum's scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother's retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd."

"Delusions are, by definition, fixed, irrational beliefs or convictions which are not amenable to rational disputation and at odds with consensual reality."

"Occultism is the metaphysics of dunces."

"Much is said amongst occult students these days anent white and black magic, and much that is said is without force, or truth... The distinction between the two exists in both motive and method, and might be summed up as follows: The white magician has for motive that which will be of benefit to the group for whom he is expending his energy and time. The magician of the left hand path ever works alone, or if he at any time co-operates with others, it is with a hidden selfish purpose. The exponent of white magic interests himself in the work of constructive endeavour in order to co-operate in hierarchical plans, and to further the desires of the planetary Logos. The Brother of Darkness occupies himself with that which lies outside the plans of the Hierarchy and with that which is not included in the purpose of the Lord of the planetary Ray."

"The cultivation of emotional tranquility is one of the first steps towards the achievement of the needed equipment of the white magician. This tranquility is not to be achieved by an effort of the will which succeeds in strangling all astral vibratory activity, but by the cultivation of response to the Ego, and negation of all response to the inherent vibration of the astral sheath itself. (3 - 983)."

"And now what methods may be employed to safeguard the worker in the field of the world? What can be done to ensure his safety in the present strife, and in the greater strife of the coming centuries? 1. A realisation that purity of all the vehicles is the prime essential. If a Dark Brother gains control over any man, it but shows that that man has in his life some weak spot.... 2. The elimination of all fear. The forces of evolution vibrate more rapidly than those of involution, and in this fact lies a recognisable security. Fear causes weakness; weakness causes a disintegration; the weak spot breaks and a gap appears, and through that gap evil force may enter.... 3. A standing firm and unmoved, no matter what occurs. Your feet may be bathed in the mud of earth, but your head may be bathed in the sunshine of the higher regions... 4. A recognition of the use of common-sense, and the application of this common-sense to the matter in hand. Sleep much, and in sleeping, learn to render the body positive; keep busy on the emotional plane, and achieve the inner calm. Do naught to overtire the body physical, and play whenever possible. In hours of relaxation comes the adjustment that obviates later tension."

"It is occult students for whom search is now being made, and not mystics; it is for clear-thinking men and women that the call has gone forth, and not for the fanatic or for the person who sees nothing but the ideal, and who is unable to work successfully with situations and things as they are, and who cannot, therefore, apply the necessary and unavoidable compromise."

"Occult blindness is spiritually induced, and "blacks out" the glory and the promised attainment and reward. The disciple is thrown back upon himself. All he can see is his problem, his tiny field of experience, and his - to him - feeble and limited equipment... The beauty of the immediate, the glory of the present opportunity, and the need to focus upon the task and service of the moment, are the rewards of moving forward into the apparently impenetrable darkness."

"The mystic is not necessarily an occultist, but the occultist embraces the mystic. Mysticism is but one step on the path of occultism. By finding the kingdom of God within himself, and by the study of the laws of his own being, the mystic becomes proficient in the laws which govern the universe, of which he is a part. The occultist recognises the kingdom of God in nature or the system, and regards himself as a small part of that greater whole, and therefore, governed by the same laws... To make it more simple for general comprehension: after initiation, the mystic is merged in the occultist, for he has become a student of occult law; he has to work with matter, with its manipulation and uses, and he has to master and control all lower forms of manifestation, and learn the rules... yet he will still have to find the God within his own being, before he can safely venture on the path of occult law."

"The basic law underlying all occult healing, may be stated to be as follows: Law I: All disease is the result of inhibited soul life, and that is true of all forms in all kingdoms. The art of the healer consists in releasing the soul, so that its life can flow through the aggregate of organisms which constitute any particular form. It is interesting to note that the attempt of the scientist to release the energy of the atom, is of the same general nature as the work of the esotericist when he endeavours to release the energy of the soul. In this release the nature of the true art of healing is hidden. Herein lies an occult hint."

"It can be expected that the orthodox Christian will at first reject the theories about the Christ which occultism presents; at the same time, this same orthodox Christian will find it increasingly difficult to induce the intelligent masses of people to accept the impossible Deity and the feeble Christ, which historical Christianity has endorsed. A Christ Who is present and living, Who is known to those who follow Him, Who is a strong and able executive, and not a sweet and sentimental sufferer, Who has never left us but Who has worked for two thousand years through the medium of His disciples, the inspired men and women of all faiths, all religions, and all religious persuasions; Who has no use for fanaticism or hysterical devotion, but Who loves all men persistently, intelligently and optimistically, Who sees divinity in them all, and Who comprehends the techniques of the evolutionary development of the human consciousness (mental, emotional and physical, producing civilizations and cultures appropriate to a particular point in evolution) – these ideas the intelligent public can and will accept. p. 589/90"

"The mystic seeks to work from the emotional to the intuitional, and thence to the Monad or Spirit. The occultist works from the physical to the mental, and thence to the atma or Spirit. One works along the line of love; the other along the line of will. The mystic fails in the purpose of his being - that of love demonstrated in activity - unless he co-ordinates the whole through the use of intelligent will. Therefore, he has to become the occultist... The occultist similarly fails, and becomes only a selfish exponent of power, working through the intelligence, unless he finds a purpose for that will and knowledge, by an animating love, which will give to him sufficient motive for all that he attempts."

"It is an insult to human nature to brand magic and the occult science with the name of imposture. To believe that for so many thousands of years, one-half of mankind practiced deception and fraud on the other half, is equivalent to saying that the human race was composed only of knaves and incurable idiots. Where is the country in which magic was not practised? At what age was it wholly forgotten? In the oldest documents now in our possession--the Vedas and the older laws of Manu--we find many magical rites practiced and permitted by the Brahmans. Tibet, Japan and China teach in the present age that which was taught by the oldest Chaldeans. The clergy of these respective countries, prove moreover what they teach, namely: that the practice of moral and physical purity, and of certain austerities, develops the vital soulpower of self-illumination. p. 19"

"How, then, can it be thought possible for a man to enter the “straight gate” of occultism when his daily and hourly thoughts are bound up with worldly things, desires of possession and power, with lust, ambition, and duties which, however honorable, are still of the earth...? Even the love for wife and family — the purest as the most unselfish of human affections is a barrier to real occultism... What lover... would not break the happiness of every other man and woman around him to satisfy the desire of one whom he loves? This is but natural... in the light of the code of human affections; less so, in that of divine universal love."

"For, while the heart is full of thoughts for a little group of selves, near and dear to us, how shall the rest of mankind fare in our souls? What percentage of love and care will there remain to bestow on the “great orphan”? And how shall the “still small voice” make itself heard in a soul entirely occupied with its own privileged tenants? What room is there left for the needs of Humanity en bloc...? He who would profit by the wisdom of the universal mind, has to reach it through the whole of Humanity without distinction of race, complexion, religion, or social status. It is altruism, not ego-ism even in its most legal and noble conception, that can lead the unit to merge its little Self in the Universal Selves. It is... to this work that the true disciple of true Occultism has to devote himself if he would obtain... divine Wisdom and Knowledge."

"It is not by studying Occultism for selfish ends, for the gratification of one’s personal ambition, pride, or vanity, that one can ever reach the true goal: that of helping suffering mankind."

"Look around you and observe. While two-thirds of civilized society ridicule the mere notion that there is anything in Theosophy, Occultism, Spiritualism, or in the Kabala, the other third is composed of the most heterogeneous and opposite elements. Some believe ... but each believes in his own way."

"A man may be a very good Theosophist indeed, whether in or outside of the Society, without being in any way an Occultist. But no one can be a true Occultist without being a real Theosophist; otherwise he is simply a black magician, whether conscious or unconscious."

"Science tells us that heat may be shown to develop electricity, electricity produce heat; and magnetism to evolve electricity, and vice versa. Motion, they tell us, results from motion itself, and so on, ad infinitum. This is the A B C of occultism and of the earliest alchemists. The indestructibility of matter and force being discovered and proved, the great problem of eternity is solved."

"Baptista Porta, the learned Italian philosopher, notwithstanding his endeavors to show to the world the groundlessness of their accusations of magic being a superstition and sorcery, was treated by later critics with the same unfairness as his colleagues. This celebrated alchemist left a work on Natural Magic ("Magia Naturalis," 1569) in which he bases all of the occult phenomena possible to man upon the world-soul which binds all with all... He shows that...by acting in unison with their parent-source, our sidereal bodies are rendered capable of producing magic wonders. The whole secret depends on our knowledge of kindred elements. He believed in the philosopher's stone, "of which the world hath so great an opinion of, which hath been bragged of in so many ages and happily attained unto by some." Finally, he throws out many valuable hints as to its "spiritual meaning." p. 229-230"

"Science, dimly perceiving the truth, may find Bacteria and other infinitesimals in the human body, and see in them but occasional and abnormal visitors to which diseases are attributed. Occultism -- which discerns a life in every atom and molecule, whether in a mineral or human body, in air, fire or water -- affirms that our whole body is built of such lives, the smallest bacteria under the microscope being to them in comparative size like an elephant to the tiniest infusoria."

"Magic is a dual power: nothing is easier than to turn it into Sorcery; an evil thought suffices for it. Therefore while theoretical Occultism is harmless, and may do good, practical Magic, or the fruits of the Tree of Life and Knowledge, or otherwise the “Science of Good and Evil,” is fraught with dangers and perils. For the study of theoretical Occultism there are, no doubt, a number of works that may be read with profit, besides such books... in Latin by the mediaeval Philosophers, generally known as Alchemists and Rosicrucians, are plentiful. But even the perusal of these may prove dangerous for the unguided student. If approached without the right key to them, and if the student is unfit, owing to mental incapacity, for Magic, and is thus unable to discern the Right from the Left Path, let him take our advice and leave this study alone; he will only bring on himself and on his family unexpected woes and sorrows, never suspecting whence they come, nor what are the powers awakened by his mind being bent on them..."

"Occultism is not magic. It is comparatively easy to learn the trick of spells and the methods of using the subtler, but still material, forces of physical nature; the powers of the animal soul in man are soon awakened; the forces which his love, his hate, his passion, can call into operation, are readily developed. But this is Black Magic—Sorcery. For it is the motive, and the motive alone, which makes any exercise of power become black, malignant, or white, beneficent Magic. It is impossible to employ spiritual forces if there is the slightest tinge of selfishness remaining in the operator. For, unless the intention is entirely unalloyed, the spiritual will transform itself into the psychic, act on the astral plane, and dire results may be produced by it."

"In Hindustan, as in England, there are doctrines for the learned, and dogmas for the unlearned; strong meat for men & milk for babes; facts for the few, & fictions for the many, realities for the wise, and romances for the simple; esoteric truth for the philosopher, & exoteric fable for the fool."

"...That dream—shall we call it a vision?—was, that you, and Mrs. K.—why forget the Theos. Soc. ?—"are all parts of a large plan for the manifestations of occult philosophy to the world." Yes; the time must come, and it is not far—when all of you will comprehend aright the apparently contradictory phases of such manifestations; forced by the evidence to reconcile them."

"The aspiration for brotherhood between our races met no response—nay, it was pooh-poohed from the first—and so, was abandoned even before I had received Mr. Sinnett's first letter. On his part and from the start, the idea was solely to promote the formation of a kind of club or "school of magic."... It was Mad. B.—not we, who originated the idea; and it was Mr. Sinnett who took it up. Notwithstanding his frank and honest admission to the effect that being unable to grasp the basic idea of Universal Brotherhood of the parent Society, his aim was but to cultivate the study of occult Sciences, an admission which ought to have stopped at once every further importunity on her part, she first succeeded in getting the consent—a very reluctant one I must say—of her own direct chief, and then my promise of co-operation—as far as I could [legally] go. Finally, through my mediation, she got that of our highest Chief, to whom I submitted the first letter you honoured me with. But, this consent, you will please bear in mind, was obtained solely under the express and unalterable condition that the new Society should be founded as a branch of the Universal Brotherhood and among its members, a few elect men would, if they chose to submit to our conditions, instead of dictating theirs—be allowed to begin the study of the occult sciences under the written directions of a Brother.""

"A hot-bed of magick we never dreamt of. Such an organization as mapped out by Mr. Sinnett and yourself is unthinkable among Europeans; and, it has become next to impossible even in India—unless you are prepared to climb to a height of 18,000 to 20,000 amidst the glaciers of the Himalayas. The greatest as well as the most promising of such schools in Europe, the last attempt in this direction,—failed most signally some 20 years ago in London. It was the secret school for the practical teaching of magick founded under the name of a club by a dozen of enthusiasts under the leadership of Lord Lytton's father. He had collected together for the purpose, the most ardent and enterprising as well as some of the most advanced scholars in mesmerism and ceremonial magic, such as Eliphas Levi, Regazzoni, and the Kopt Zergvan—Bey. And yet in the pestilent London atmosphere the "Club came to an untimely end. I visited it about half-a-dozen times, and perceived from the first that there was and could be nothing in it. And this is also the reason why, the British T.S. does not progress one step practically. They are of the Universal Brotherhood but in name, and gravitate at best towards Quietism—that utter paralysis of the Soul. They are intensely selfish in their aspirations and will get but the reward of their selfishness."

"The student of occult science either knows a thing or suspends his judgment about it; there is no place in his scheme for blind faith. Naturally, beginners in the study cannot yet know for themselves, so they are asked to read the results of the various observations and to deal with them as probable hypotheses—provisionally to accept and act upon them, until such time as they can prove them for themselves."

"We tend in these days to be impatient; if we try any plan we expect immediate results from it, and if we do not get them, we give up that plan and try something else. That is not the way to make progress in occultism. The effort which we are making is to compress into one or two lives the evolution which would naturally take perhaps a hundred lives. That is not the sort of undertaking in which immediate results are to be expected. We attempt to uproot an evil habit, and we find it hard work; why? Because we have indulged in that practice for, perhaps, twenty thousand years; one cannot shake off the custom of twenty thousand years in a day or two."

"Another great difficulty in our way is the lack of clearness in our thought. People in the West are little used to clear thought with regard to religious matters. Everything is vague and nebulous. For occult development vagueness and nebulosity will not do. Our conceptions must be clear-cut and our thought-images definite. Other necessary characteristics are calmness and cheerfulness; these are rare in modern life, but are absolute essentials for the work which we are here undertaking."

"A large number of men have attained the Adept level—men not of one nation, but of all the leading nations of the world—rare souls who with indomitable courage have... captured her innermost secrets, and so have truly earned the right to be called Adepts. Among Them there are many degrees and many lines of activity; but always some of Them remain within touch of our earth as members of this Hierarchy which has in charge the administration of the affairs of our world and of the spiritual evolution of our humanity... A few of these great Adepts, who are thus working for the good of the world, are willing to take as apprentices those who have resolved to devote themselves utterly to the service of mankind; such Adepts are called Masters. One of these apprentices was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky—a great soul who was sent out to offer knowledge to the world. With Colonel Henry Steel Olcott she founded The Theosophical Society for the spread of this knowledge which she had to give. Among those who came into contact with her... Mr. A.P. Sinnett... his keen intellect at once grasped the magnitude and the importance of the teaching... Although Madame Blavatsky herself had previously written Isis Unveiled, it had attracted but little attention, and it was Mr. Sinnett who first made the teaching really available for western readers in his two books, The Occult World and Esoteric Buddhism."

"The term ‘occultism’ is one which has been much misunderstood. In the mind of the ignorant it was, even recently, synonymous with magic, and its students were supposed to be practitioners of the black art, veiled in flowing robes of scarlet covered with cabalistic signs, sitting amidst uncanny surrounding's with a black cat as a familiar, compounding unholy decoctions by the aid of Satanic evocations. Even now, and among those whom education has raised above such superstition as this, there still remains a good deal of misapprehension. For them its derivation from the Latin word occultus ought to explain at once that it is the science of the hidden; but they often regard it contemptuously as nonsensical and unpractical, as connected with dreams and fortune-telling, with hysteria and necromancy, with the search for the elixir of life and the philosopher’s stone. p. 3/4"

"Students, who should know better, perpetually speak as though the hidden side of things were intentionally concealed, as though knowledge with regard to it ought to be in the hands of all men, but was being deliberately withheld by the caprice or selfishness of a few; whereas the fact is that nothing is or can be hidden from us except by our own limitations, and that for every man as he evolves the world grows wider and wider, because he is able to see more and more of its grandeur and its loveliness."

"At each of the great Initiations, which mark the advance of the neophyte along the of the higher 25rogress, a definite new block of knowledge is given to him. That is quite true, but the knowledge can be given only because the recipient has evolved to the point at which he can grasp it. It is no more being withheld from ordinary humanity than the knowledge of conic sections is being withheld from the child who is still struggling with the multiplication-table. When that child reaches the level at which he can comprehend quadratic equations, the teacher is ready to explain to him the rules which govern them. In exactly the same way..."

"People who have been trained in European habits of thought are, unhappily, so familiar with the idea that a blind, unreasoning adhesion to certain dogmas may be claimed from a disciple of any religion, school or sect, that on hearing that in Occultism doubt is considered to be an obstacle to progress, they are likely to suppose that this Path also requires from its followers the same unquestioning faith as do many modern superstitions. No idea could be more entirely false. p. 194"

"It is true that doubt (or rather uncertainty) on some questions is a bar to spiritual progress, but the antidote to that doubt is not blind faith (which is itself considered a fetter, as will presently be seen), but the certainty of conviction founded on individual experiment or mathematical reasoning. While a child doubts the accuracy of the multiplication table, he can hardly acquire proficiency in the higher mathematics; but his doubts can be satisfactorily cleared up only by his attaining a comprehension, founded on reasoning or experiment, that the statements contained in the table are true. He believes that twice two are four, not merely because he has been told so, but because it has become to him a self-evident fact. And this is exactly the method, and the only method, of resolving doubt known to Occultism. p. 194"

"Blessings. Under this heading should come the various types of blessings such as are given in the Church, in Freemasonry, and by the pupils of our Masters. Blessings may be arranged in two sections—those which a man gives from himself, and those which are given through him as an official by a higher power. The first kind of blessing is merely an expression of an earnest good wish... this will depend upon the earnestness of the good wish and the amount of spiritual force put into it... If the words were uttered... without much feeling or intention behind them, the effect would be slight and transient; on the other hand, if they came from a full heart and were uttered with definite determination, their effect would be deep and lasting. The second type of blessing is that which is uttered by an official appointed for the purpose, through whom power flows from some higher source... the power of giving a definite blessing is one of those conferred upon the Priest at his ordination... he is simply a channel for the power from on high, and if it should unfortunately happen that he speaks it merely as a matter of course and as part of his ritual, that would make no difference to the spiritual power outpoured. The blessing flows equally over all, but the amount of the influences which any individual can obtain from it depends upon his receptivity. p. 142-143"

"I well remember giving each of these (Blessings) on different occasions to a great Angel of the neighbourhood with whom I have the honour to be well acquainted. Passing close to his territories... I gave him once as a greeting the full blessing of my Master, and it was indeed beautiful to see the way in which he received it, bowing profoundly and showing his appreciation by a lovely soft glow of holiness and uttermost devotion. Another day under similar circumstances I gave him the blessing of the Brotherhood, and instantly every power of that great Angel flashed out in glad response, and the whole of his territory lit up. It was as though a soldier had leapt to attention, as though everything, not only within himself but in all the thousands of minor creatures working under him, had suddenly been vivified and raised to its highest power. All nature instantly responded. You see, my Master, however deeply reverenced by him, is not his Master, but my King is his King, for there is but One."

"The Lord Buddha has his own special type of force, which he outpours when he gives his blessing to the world, and this benediction is a unique and very marvellous thing; for by his authority and position a Buddha has access to planes of nature which are altogether beyond our reach, hence he can transmute and draw down to our level the forces peculiar to those planes. Without this mediation of the Buddha these forces would be of no use to us here in physical life; their vibrations are so tremendous, so incredibly rapid, that they would pass through us unsensed at any level we can reach, and we should never even know of their existence. But as it is, the force of the blessing is scattered all over the world; and it instantly finds for itself channels through which it can pour (just as water instantly finds an open pipe), thereby strengthening all good work and bringing peace to the hearts of those who are able to receive it."

"Life is often sorrow, but a kind of sorrow that can be entirely avoided. The man who lives the ordinary life of the world often finds himself in trouble of various kinds. It would not be true to say that he is always in sorrow, but he is often in anxiety, and he is always liable at any moment to fall into great sorrow or anxiety. The reason for this is that he is full of lower desires of various kinds, not at all necessarily wicked, but desires for lower things; and because of these desires he is tied down and confined. He is constantly striving to attain something which he has not, and he is full of anxiety as to whether he will attain it; and when he has attained it, he is anxious lest he should lose it....How often, for example, a young man desires affection from someone who cannot give it to him, who has it not to give! From such a desire as that comes often a great deal of sadness, jealousy and much other ill-feeling. You will say that such a desire is natural; undoubtedly it is, and affection which is returned is a great source of happiness. Yet if it cannot be returned, a man should have the strength to accept the situation, and not allow sorrow to be caused by the unsatisfied desire."

"When we say that a thing is natural, we mean that it is what we might expect from the average man. But the student of occultism must try to rise somewhat above the level of the average man—otherwise how can he help that man? We must rise above that level in order that we may be able to reach down a helping hand. We must aim not at the natural (in the sense of the average), but at the supernatural. One who is clairvoyant will readily subscribe to the truth of this great teaching of the Buddha, that on the whole life is sorrow; for if he looks at the astral and mental bodies of those whom he meets he will see that they are filled with a vast number of small vortices all whirling vigorously, representing all sorts of odd little thoughts, little anxieties, little troubles about one thing or another. All these cause disturbance and suffering, and what is needed most of all for progress is serenity. The only way to gain peace is to get rid of them altogether..."

"I understand that the word ‘occult’ means hidden, but surely that is not meant to be the final state of all this information, hidden forever. I don’t see why there is any need to further obscure things that are actually lucid and bright. Language and strange terminology – to keep them as some private mystery. I think there is too much darkness in magic. I can understand that it is part of the theatre. I can understand Aleister Crowley – who I think was a great intellect that was sometimes let down by his own flair for showmanship — but he did a lot to generate the scary aura of the magician that you find these sad, Crowleyite fucks making a fetish of. The ones who say ‘oh we’re into Aleister Crowley because he was the wickedest man in the world, and we’re also into Charles Manson because we’re bad. And we are middle-class as well, but we’re bad’. There are some people who seek evil – I don’t think there is such a thing as evil – but there are people who seek it as a kind of Goth thing. That just adds to the murk to what to me is a very lucid and flourescent subject. What occultism needs is someone to open the window, it’s too stuffy and it smells. Let’s get some fresh air, throw open the curtains – I can’t go for that posturing, spooky guy stuff. When they wanted me to do Fortean TV it became apparent that they wanted me to be Spooky Bloke. But I’m not actually trying to look spooky. I dress in black because it makes me look less fat, it’s as simple as that. It’s not a gothic flourish. I don’t want to be thought of as a figure of mystery or a master of the occult, surely this is about illumination, casting light on things. I’m an illuminist, that’d do for me."

"The more I look at most of the art movements, it’s all occultism, when you get down to it. The Surrealists were openly talking about being magicians."

"Annie Besant’s book where she put forward the idea that theosophical mystical energies could be portrayed as colours or abstract shapes was practically the invention of abstract art. A lot of artists rushed out and read it and suddenly thought, ‘oh God you could, you could portray love as a colour, or depression as a colour” All of a sudden abstract art happens, a flowering out of occultism."

"When it is asked, Are the worlds habitable? reply affirmatively. True, from the earthly point of view, there is not residence everywhere, but in the sense of existence the worlds are habitable. Actually, all these different evolutions are not always accessible to each other. Yet it will not be a great mistake to say that all manifested space is habitable. The microscope indicates life throughout the entire planet; the same law applies also to space. Let us turn again to the harm of killing. Each explosion violates the equilibrium of many beings invisible to us. Not millions but incalculable billions are injured by war. One must not forget all the atmospheric turbulence from gases and explosions. This is not occultism, but scientifically sound common sense. Thus, let humanity not forget about the counterblow."

"The Master Morya, Fiery World, Part I (1933) p. 229."

"Let us tell him who strives for practical occultism to reflect about incarnations, about the mystery of birth and of change of existence. It is inadmissible to by-pass manifestations of great significance. Such manifestations, before the eyes of all, can inspire thought about the essence of Be-ness. It is impossible to disregard such remarkable manifestations as the transmission and reception of thoughts. Not for derision are the recountings about little children who appear with remembrance of former lives and who can perceive the thoughts of others."

"Probably there is no single doctrine of the Esoteric Tradition which makes so instant an appeal as does the idea of the present existence in the world of great sages or seers. In most minds there lies an intuition that there must be in the world human beings of far loftier spiritual capacity and of immensely more developed intellectual power than the ordinary run of men. Those who hear of this for the first time instantly turn to those luminous figures, such as Gautama the Buddha, Jesus the Syrian avatara, Apollonius of Tyana, Lao-Tse, Krishna, Sankaracharya, etc. and, among many, the first reaction is: if such great figures have already existed in the world, why should they not exist again? Ch. 19"

"The Brotherhood of great seers and sages, united in a common purpose and governed by common ideals and esoteric knowledge, has existed as an association of high adepts under the direct inspiration and guidance of their hierarch, or mahaguru, for many millions of years — certainly for not less than twelve million; in other words, since the appearance on earth of the root-race which preceded our own present fifth root-race...The cause of the disappearance of the Mysteries has always been degeneracy, faithlessness on the part of the students, and their lack of an imperative and heart-reaching call for light. Where there is a genuine spiritual and intellectual call issuing from both heart and mind, there invariably comes the response by way of a new installment of teaching from the Brotherhood. Ch.22"

"To label Seth as a spirit guide is to limit an understanding of what he is . . . The minute I found out after my first book was published that this automatically put me in what people called the psychic field . . . I was so humiliated I could hardly hold my head up. I'm using my writing [and] my life to transform intuitive, sometimes revelationary material into art, where it can be enjoyed, understood to varying degrees, and stand free of the stupid interpretations . . . The whole psychic bit as it is, is intellectually and morally psychologically outrageous as far as I'm concerned and I want no part of it or the vocabulary or the ideas."

"Avoid all magic and pseudo-occultism! Without the proper development and broadening of consciousness, all the widespread suggestions for the sliding out of the astrosom, and other externalizations, conjurations and other manifestations, might be harmful."

"Everything you say about the so-called occult groups does not surprise us but confirms what we expected, as we know of the sad situation within many organizations and we know that human nature is everywhere similar. The evil is always the same: lack of tolerance and a terrible exclusiveness which destroys all foundations. The presidents of numerous societies and lodges pretend to have an exclusive monopoly and authority over everything concerning the Teaching given by the Great White Brotherhood. In addition, some wish to be the sole channel through which the High Teaching may be introduced. But in the poverty of their imagination they fail to see that the Great Brotherhood, which leads the evolution of the whole of humanity, cannot limit itself to one or even ten currents or recipients who are, in any case, just temporary!"

"No tricks of pseudo-occultism and magic will lead to true... In order to... one has to establish the corresponding high vibrations. The application in life of the Living Ethics is the quickest way to reach the goal. And now one more warning: theoretical occultism is most dangerous. Many most harmful books flood the market.... As it is said, "Many of them are the creation of hands that are lacking in beauty, knowledge and honesty.""

"There are many ways of resisting evil. First of all, by the power of spirit—certainly, resistance performed without hatred, occultly speaking, is a hundredfold stronger. All these assertions of Christ prove that He was an Initiate, and that He knew the strength of the reversed blow. Similarly, one should understand the words from Deuteronomy (the book of Moses): "To me belongeth vengeance, and recompense." The Apostle Paul uses this very apophthegm in his Epistle to the Romans. Again, we see that Christ came not to destroy the law but to fulfil it."

"Why should Venus and Mercury have no satellites, and by what, when they exist, were they formed? The Astronomers 'do not know.' Because, we say, science has only one key — the key of matter — to open the mysteries of nature withal, while occult philosophy has seven keys and explains that which science fails to see. Mercury and Venus have no satellites, but they had 'parents' just as the Earth had. Both are far older than the Earth, and, before the latter reaches her seventh Round, her mother Moon will have dissolved into thin air, as the 'Moons' of the other planets have, or have not, as the case may be, since there are planets which have several moons — a mystery again which no Oedipus of astronomy has solved. ."

"This course of lectures was designed to put before the public in broad outline some of the principal teachings of Theosophy, and also to help men to realize something of its scope and comprehensiveness by showing how wonderfully all else is included in it — how it is the mighty truth underlying all systems of religious thought, even those which differ as much on the physical plane as do Buddhism, Christianity and the Ancient Mysteries, and how also it offers the only rational and coherent explanation of the phenomena connected with clairvoyance, telepathy, mesmerism, spiritualism, dreams and apparitions. The titles of the lectures were as follows"

"The course of lectures as a whole offered a popular and necessarily somewhat superficial exposition from the Theosophical standpoint of most of the manifestations of occultism known to the Western world at the present day, and it gave also a few glimpses into the fuller and more perfect manifestations which were current two thousand years ago. It seems to me, therefore, that these lectures may perhaps be of some use to our members, as offering them a -starting point for their thought along all these various lines, and it is with that hope that I am putting them before our Society in this form."

"Many persons who feel themselves attracted towards Theosophy, whose interest is aroused by its reasonableness and by the manner in which it accounts for many things which otherwise seem inexplicable, yet hesitate to take up its study more deeply, lest they should presently find it contradicting the faith in which they have been brought up — lest, as they often put it, it should take away from them their religion. How, if a religion be true, the study of another truth can take it away, is not very clear; but, however illogical the fear may be, there is no doubt that it exists It is nevertheless entirely unwarranted"

"Theosophy neither attacks nor opposes any form of religion; on the contrary, it explains and harmonizes all. It holds that all religions alike are attempts to state the same great underlying truths— differing in external form and in nomenclature, because they were delivered by different teachers, at different periods of the world’s history, and to widely different races of men; but always agreeing in fundamentals, and giving identical instruction upon every subject of real importance. We* hold in Theosophy that this truth which lies at the back of all these faiths alike is itself within the reach of man, and indeed it is to that very truth that we give the name Theosophy, or Divine Wisdom, and it is that which we are trying to study."

"No man need fear that we shall attack his religion, but we may help him to understand it better than he did before There is nothing in Theosophy which is many way in opposition to true primitive Christianity, though it may not always be possible to agree with the interpretations put upon that truth by modern dogmatic theology, which is quite another matter."

"If we come down to the other end of this great gamut, to very slow vibrations, we shall find a certain number so slow as to affect the heavy matter of the atmosphere to strike upon the tympanum of our ear and reach us as sound there may be, and there must be, an infinity of sounds which are too high or too low for the human ear to respond to them; and to all such sounds, of which there must be millions and millions, the human ear is absolutely deaf. If there be vibrations so slow that they appear to vs as sound, and other exceedingly rapid ones which appear as light, what are all the others? Assuredly there are vibrations of all intermediate rates We have them as electrical phenomena of various kinds; we have them as the Rontgen rays. In fact, the whole secret of the Rontgen rays, or X-rays, is simply the bringing within the capacity of our eyes and within the field of our vision a few more rays, a few of the finer rates of vibration, which normally would be out of our reach"

"Vegetables contain more nutriment than an equal amount of dead flesh. This will sound a surprising and incredible statement to many people, because they have been brought up to believe that they cannot exist unless they defile themselves with flesh, and this delusion is so widely spread that it is very difficult to awaken the average man from it. It must be clearly understood that this is not a question of habit, or of sentiment, or of prejudice; it is simply a question of plain fact, and as to the facts there is not and there never has been the slightest question. There are four elements necessary in food, all of them essential to the repair and the upbuilding of the body..."

"The use of flesh foods, by the excitation that it exercises on the nervous system, prepares the way for habits of intemperance in everything; and the more flesh is consumed, the more serious is the danger of confirmed alcoholism"

"The lower part of man’s nature is undoubtedly intensified by the habit of feeding upon corpses. Even after eating a full meal of such horrible material, a man still feels unsatisfied, for he is still conscious of a vague, uncomfortable sense of want, and consequently he suffers greatly from nervous strain. This craving is the hunger of the bodily tissues, which cannot be renewed by the poor stuff offered to them as food. To satisfy this vague craving, or rather to appease these restless nerves so that it will no longer be felt, recourse is often had to stimulants. Sometimes alcoholic beverages are taken; sometimes an attempt is made to allay these feelings with black coffee, and at other times strong tobacco is used in the endeavor to soothe the irritated, exhausted nerves. Here we have the beginning of intemperance, for in the majority of cases intemperance began in the attempt to allay with alcoholic stimulants the vague, uncomfortable sense of want which follows the eating of impoverished food—food that does not feed."

"There is no doubt that drunkenness, and all the poverty, wretchedness, disease and crime associated with it, may frequently be traced to errors of feeding."

"The subject of the future that lies before humanity may obviously be treated in various ways; perhaps the simplest division which we can make is to speak first of the immediate future, then of the remoter future, then of the final goal... it is well that we should try to look forward a little, so that we who are units m this great mass of humanity may be able to take our part intelligently in the evolution which we see to be progressing all round us."

"Unless we are terribly prejudiced, we must admit that in spite of our boasted civilization there is very much which is highly unsatisfactory... In every direction we see lamentable failures, although in certain matters there may be success and progress."

"One of the most important factors of human life — religion... Wherever we may look all over the world we shall find religion in an unsatisfactory condition.,, Religion has given us far too largely faith instead of knowledge; it has given us some hope, perhaps, hut no certainty; it has put before us dogmas and authoritative statements, but very little of clear reason, very little that can be definitely comprehended; and that is why many of the most cultured people find themselves believing in it in only a half-hearted way, even if they are able to accept its conclusions at all-"

"Again, if we examine the social conditions of the world, we must once more admit that things are far from satisfactory; for although there are those who push to the front and make enormous fortunes, there are also great masses of people who are still steeped in poverty and in ignorance..."

"In every country we see society more or less at war with itself, race against race, where there are different races, class against class, labour against capital, and sometimes even sex against sex. Everywhere seems to be the clash of warring interests, and so people range themselves on opposite sides. Then the great question of government is also in an unsatisfactorv condition; for I think all will agree that there is no country in the world which is governed, as every country in the world ought to be, solely with regard to the interests and advancement of the people. All of these difficulties arise from ignorance and selfishness If men understood the plan of evolution instead of working each for his own personal ends they would all join together as a community and work harmoniously for the good of all with mutual tolerance and forbearance. It is obvious that if this were done all of these evils would almost immediately cease or at any rate could very shortly be removed"

"Everyday a greater number of people are beginning to understand to some extent and to strive towards a better and more rational condition of affairs. There are many societies and associations which have for their object the amelioration of the condition of humanity Some of them begin at one end and some at the other, each approaches it from his own point of view and with his own set of remedies, but at least they are striving towards that development of unselfishness which is the only true solution of all our difficulties."

"In the mighty civilization of Atlantis a level of universal prosperity for all was attained which we certainly have not yet reached, and that condition in their case was stable and lasted for thousands of years. But to that great race came also the test that comes to all nations, when the fuller truth gradually dawns upon them, and when their people come to know the possibility of powers higher than the physical plane. The great nation of Atlantis misused these powers', majority there chose the path of selfishness and not of selflessness, and so Atlantis perished."

"We are now repeating the earlier part of their history; we are increasing in wealth and in prosperity, and we are gradually tending towards the world-wide dominion which was held by Atlantis Many among us are now beginning to obtain glimpses, at any rate, of these higher powers, and assuredly the knowledge of them and the possession of them will steadily spread among us. So we are repeating the history of Atlantis very closely, and the question for us is whether having thus reproduced the earlier part of it we are about to follow its example in the latter part — ^whether after repeating the glory and the expansion of the world wide empire, we are going also to repeat the disgrace and the downfall Whether that will happen to the present civilization of the world or not depends very largely upon the men of today, the men who are here at the beginning of the new order of things"

"Never was there a greater need for the diffusion of knowledge, for in the present ignorance of men there is very real and imminent danger."

"There is no time to waste, for the forces of discontent and danger are daily growing, and at any moment some spark may light a conflagration, the extent of which no man can foresee."

"We can speak with greater certainty as to the remoter future than we can with regard to that which is more immediately impending. The study of the earlier ages of humanity and a comparison of their conditions with the state of affairs at the present day shows us quite clearly the direction in which evolution is moving; so that there can be no question that after a certain considerable lapse of time qualities which are now only just beginning to dawn will be fully developed, and all the conditions of society will be radically changed thereby."

"There can be no uncertainty with regard to this; but the intermediate steps through which we must pass are not so clearly defined, I have often had occasion to speak of the possession by man of the astral and mental bodies, and of the development within some of us of the senses of these bodies, so that they have become what is commonly called clairvoyant. Those who possess these faculties now are those who have turned their attention especially to them either in this life or in some previous existence; but the faculties are undoubtedly the heritage of every human being, and there is no question that the race is moving steadily towards their fuller development. I have explained in the concluding chapter of The Other Side of Death how the man who wishes for the use of these faculties may proceed to unfold them within himself."

"That process, however, is only an acceleration of what nature is gradually doing for us all; and the time is not far distant when a considerable portion of the higher races of mankind will possess them naturally and without any special effort. In America we have the most striking evidence that this statement is true, for the proportion of partially psychic men and women is far greater here than it is many of the older nations with the exception, perhaps of some of the smaller and distinctly Keltic races such as the Highlanders of Scotland p. 336"

"Let us think then of the time when the majority of the men of advanced races will possess such endowments as these and let us see what difference that will make their lives. Naturally the development of astral sight will come first To the advanced and trained clairvoyant the possession of astral sight is a very small matter, for he can reach much higher than that, and has much more extended powers at his command But for the majority of people the possession of even this faculty would change the whole face of life I remember once hearing Mrs Besant speak on this subject, and she explained that there were three great parallel roads as it were along which men would progress — the paths of Power, Wisdom and Love She said that if one examines these three roads one may easily see for oneself what difference be made in each of them when the higher faculties of man are developed. Under these three headings she grouped the various activities through which the powers of man could be manifested."

"There is very truly a gospel in all this teaching us never to forget that though the outer side of life may seem so dull and heavy, there is yet always the Divine fire glowing within, remember that “the soul of things is sweet, the heart of being is celestial rest , stronger than woe is Will, that which is good doth pass to better, best. So this celestial bliss, that lies beyond the sorrow and the suffering shall become for you the ever present reality, until you learn to look through the misery and see its cause — and not only to see the cause but (far beyond that) the exhaustion of that evil through this temporary suffering, and the glory that is to come the magnificent qualities which all this is developing in the man."

"This gospel will become a living reality to you. So, although you sympathize ever more and more deeply, you will find that you have within you the power to help, to comfort and to save, because you know, because you have this gospel in your hearts, and so you can communicate its light to others So you will say to them once more, in the words of the greatest of Indian teachers: "Do not complain, and cry and pray, but open your eyes and see; the light is all about you, if you will only remove the bandage from your eyes and look; it is always with you, so wonderful, so glorious, so far beyond anything that man has ever dreamt of or prayed for, and it is forever and forever.” p. 392"

"We all know what is meant by Vegetarianism; and although there are several varieties of it... We need not concern ourselves with these divisions, but simply define the vegetarian as one who abstains from any food which is obtained by the slaughter of animals—of course including birds and fish."

"How shall we define Occultism? The word is derived from the Latin occultus, hidden; so that it is the study of the hidden laws of nature. Since all the great laws of nature are in fact working in the invisible world far more than in the visible, Occultism involves the acceptance of a much wider view of nature than that which is ordinarily taken. The occultist, then, is a man who studies all the laws of nature that he can reach or of which he can hear, and as a result of his study he identifies himself with those laws and devotes his life to the service of evolution."

"How does Occultism regard Vegetarianism? It regards it very favorably, and that for many reasons."

"One of the objections frequently brought against vegetarianism is that it is a beautiful theory, but one the working of which is impracticable, since it is supposed that a man cannot live without devouring dead flesh. That objection is irrational, and is founded upon ignorance or perversion of facts."

"We Want the Best. I take it that in food, as well as in everything else, we all of us want the best that is within our means. We should like to bring our lives, and therefore our daily food as a not unimportant part of our lives, into harmony with our aspirations, into harmony with the highest that we know."

"It has been the sad experience of many that much of the best and the most beautiful is lost to those whose mental food consists exclusively of the sensational paper or the cheap novel, or of that frothy mass of waste material which is thrown up like scum upon the molten metal of life—novelettes, serials, and fragments of a type which neither teach the ignorant, nor strengthen the weak, nor develop the immature."

"The destruction of life is always a crime. There may be certain cases in which it is the lesser of two evils; but here it is needless and without a shadow of justification, for it happens only because of the selfish unscrupulous greed of those who coin money out of the agonies of the animal kingdom in order to pander to the perverted tastes of those who are sufficiently depraved to desire such loathsome aliment."

"It is not only those who do the obscene work, but those who by feeding upon this dead flesh encourage them and make their crime remunerative, who are guilty... of this awful thing."

"Beyond all question the future is with the vegetarian."

"It seems certain that in the future — and I hope it may be in the near future — we shall be looking back upon this time with disgust and with horror."

"I am certain that our descendants will look back upon this age as one of only partial civilisation, and in fact but little removed from savagery."

"I am abandoning the field of ordinary physical reasoning, and taking you up to the level where you have, naturally, to take the word of those who have explored these higher realms. Let us then turn now to the hidden side of all this — the occult."

"There are many types and degrees of density among astral matter, for example, so that it is possible for one man to have an astral body built of coarse and gross particles, while another may have one which is much more delicate and refined. As the astral body is the vehicle of the emotions, passions and sensations, it follows that the man whose astral body is of the grosser type will be chiefly amenable to the grosser varieties of passion and emotion; whereas the man who has a finer astral body will find that its particles most readily vibrate in response to higher and more refined emotions and aspirations."

"We all know that on the physical plane the effect of over-indulgence in dead flesh is to produce a coarse, gross appearance in the man. That does not mean that it is only the physical body which is in an unlovely condition; it means also that those parts of the man which are invisible to our ordinary sight, the astral and the mental bodies, are not in good condition"

"The man who learns to see these higher vehicles sees at once the effects on the higher bodies produced by impurity in the lower; he sees at once the difference between the man who feeds his physical vehicle with pure food and the man who puts into it this loathsome decaying flesh."

"Let us see how this difference will affect the man’s evolution."

"It is clear that a man’s duty with regard to himself is to develop all his different vehicles as far as possible, in order to make them finished instruments for the use of the soul. There is a still higher stage in which that soul itself is being trained to be a fit instrument in the hands of the Deity, a perfect channel for the divine grace; but the first step towards this high aim is that the soul itself shall learn thoroughly to control the lower bodies, so that there shall be in them no thought or feeling except those which the soul allows."

"The physical, body and its sense perceptions can never be at their best unless the food is pure."

"Anyone who adopts vegetarian diet will speedily begin to notice that his sense of taste or of smell is far keener than it was when he fed upon flesh, and that he is now able to discern a delicate difference of flavor in foods which before he had thought of as tasteless, such as rice and wheat."

"The same thing is true to a still greater extent with regard to the higher bodies. Their senses cannot be clear if impure or coarse matter is drawn into them; anything of this nature clogs and dulls them"

"This is a fact which has always been recognized by the student of Occultism; you will find that all those who in ancient days entered upon the Mysteries were men of the utmost purity, and of course invariably vegetarian. Carnivorous diet is fatal to anything like real development, and those who adopt it are throwing serious and unnecessary difficulties in their own way."

"The purity of the heart and of the soul is more important to a man than that of the body. Yet there is surely no reason why we should not have both; indeed, the one suggests the other, and the higher should include the lower."

"We are none of us so far advanced along the road towards spirituality that we can afford to neglect the great advantage that it gives us. Anything that makes our path harder than it need be is emphatically something to be avoided. In all cases this flesh food undoubtedly makes the physical body a worse instrument, and puts difficulties in the way of the soul by intensifying all the undesirable elements and passions belonging to these lower planes."

"If, through introducing loathsome impurities into the physical body, the man builds himself a coarse and unclean astral body, we have to remember that it is in this degraded vehicle that he will have to spend the first part of his life after death... all sorts of undesirable entities will be drawn into association with him and will make his vehicles their home, and find a ready response within him to their lower passions. It is not only that his animal passions are more easily stirred here on earth, but in addition to this he will suffer acutely from the working out of these desires after death."

"The higher sight, when brought to bear upon this problem, shows us still more vividly how undesirable is the devouring of flesh, since it intensifies within us that from which we most need to be free, and therefore, from the point of view of progress, that habit is a thing to be cast out at once and forever."

"Every religion has taught that man should put himself always on the side of the will of God in the world, on the side of good as against evil, of evolution as against retrogression. The man who ranges himself on the side of evolution realizes the wickedness of destroying life; for he knows that, just as he is here in this physical body in order that he may learn the lessons of this plane, so is the animal occupying his body for the same reason, that through it he may gain experience at his lower stage. He knows that the life behind the animal is the Divine Life, that all life in the world is Divine; the animals therefore are truly our brothers, even though they may be younger brothers, and we can have no sort of right to take their lives for the gratification of our perverted tastes"

"The feelings of nervousness and profound depression which are so common there, are largely due to that awful influence which spreads over the city like a plague-cloud. I do not know how many thousands of creatures are killed every day, but the number is very large. Remember that every one of these creatures is a definite entity — not a permanent, reincarnating individuality like yours or mine, but still an entity which has its life upon the astral plane, and persists there for a considerable time. Remember that every one of these remains to pour out his feelings of indignation and horror at all the injustice and torment which has been inflicted upon him. Realize for yourself the terrible atmosphere which exists about those slaughterhouses; remember that a clairvoyant can see the vast hosts of animal souls, that he knows how strong are their feelings of horror and resentment, and how these recoil at all points upon the human race."

"I read an article only the other day, in which it was explained that the nauseating stench which rises from those Chicago slaughterhouses, and settles like a fatal miasma over the city, is by no means the most deadly influence that comes up from that Christian hell for animals, though it is the breath of certain death to many a mother’s darling. The slaughterhouses make not only a pest-hole for the bodies of children, but for their souls as well. Not only are the children employed in the most revolting and cruel work, but the whole trend of their thoughts is directed towards killing... I read how one boy, for whom a minister had secured a place in the slaughterhouse, returned home day after day, pale and sick and unable to eat or sleep, and finally came to that minister of the gospel of the compassionate Christ and told him that he was willing to starve if necessary, but that he could not wade in blood another day. The horrors of the slaughter had so affected him that he could no longer sleep. Yet this is what many a boy is doing and seeing from day to day, until he becomes hardened to the taking of life; and then some day, instead of cutting the throat of a lamb or a pig, he kills a man, and straightway we turn our lust for slaughter upon him in turn, and think that we have done justice."

"I read that a young woman, who does much philanthropic work in the neighborhood of these pest-houses declares that what most impresses her about the children is that they seem to have no games except games of killing, that they have no conception of any relation to animals except the relation of the slaughter to the victim. This is the education which so-called Christians are giving to the children of the slaughterhouse —a daily education in murder; and then they express surprise at the number and brutality of the murders in that district. Yet your Christian public goes on serenely saying its prayers and singing its psalms and listening to its sermons, as if no such outrages were being perpetrated against God’s children in that sink-hole of pestilence and crime. Surely the habit of eating dead flesh has produced a moral apathy among us."

"Even on the physical plane this is a terribly serious matter, and from the occult point of view it is unfortunately far more serious still; for the occultist sees the psychic results of all this, sees how these forces are acting upon the people and how they intensify brutality and unscrupulousness. He sees what a center of vice and of crime you have created, and how from it the infection is gradually spreading until it affects the whole country, and even the whole of what is called civilized humanity."

"The world is being affected by it in many ways which most people do not in the least realize. There are constant feelings of causeless terror in the air. Many of your children are unnecessarily and inexplicably afraid; they feel terror of they know not what—terror of the dark, or when they are alone for a few moments. Strong forces are playing about us for which you cannot account, and you do not realize that this all comes from the fact that the whole atmosphere is charged with the hostility of these murdered creatures."

"The average man is not after all a brute, but means to be kind if he only knew how. He does not think; he goes on from day to day, and does not realise that he is taking part all the time in an awful crime... every one who is partaking of this abomination is helping to make this appalling thing a possibility, and undoubtedly shares the responsibility for it."

"Let us at least make the experiment; let us free ourselves from complicity in these awful crimes, let us set ourselves to try, each in our own small circle, to bring nearer that bright time of peace and love which is the dream and the earnest desire of every true-hearted and thinking man."

"There is a school of Philosophy still in existence of which modern culture has lost sight. Glimpses of it are discernible in the ancient philosophies with which all educated men are familiar, but these are hardly more intelligible than fragments of forgotten sculpture,-less so, for we comprehend the human form, and can give imaginary limbs to a torso; but we can give no imaginary meaning to the truth coming down to us from Plato or Pythagoras, pointing, for those who hold the clue to their significance, to the secret knowledge of the ancient world. Side lights, nevertheless, may enable us to decipher such language, and a very rich intellectual reward offers itself to persons who are willing to attempt the investigation. (Introduction)"

"For, strange as the statement will appear at first sight, modern metaphysics, and to a large extent modern physical science, have been groping for centuries blindly after knowledge which occult philosophy has enjoyed in full measure all the while. Owing to a train of fortunate circumstances, I have come to know that this is the case; I have come into some contact with persons who are heirs of a greater knowledge concerning the mysteries of Nature and humanity than modern culture has yet evolved; and my present wish is to sketch the outlines of this knowledge, to record with exactitude the experimental proofs I have obtained that occult science invest its adepts with a control of natural forces superior to that enjoyed by physicists of the ordinary type, and the grounds there are for bestowing the most respectful consideration on the theories entertained by occult science concerning the constitution and destinies of the human soul. (Introduction)"

"People in the present day will be slow to believe that any knowledge worth considering can be found outside the bright focus of Western culture. Modern science has accomplished grand results by the open method of investigation, and is very impatient of the theory that persons who ever attained to real knowledge, either in sciences or metaphysics, could have been content to hide their light under a bushel. So the tendency has been to conceive that occult philosophers of old- Egyptian priests, Chaldean Magi, Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-Platonists, and the rest-who kept their knowledge secret, must have adopted that policy to conceal the fact that they knew very little. Mystery can only have been loved by charlatans who wished to mystify. The conclusion is pardonable from the modern point of view, but it has given rise to an impression in the popular mind that the ancient mystics have actually been turned inside out, and found to know very little. This impression is absolutely erroneous. (Introduction)"

"Men of science in former ages worked in secret, and instead of publishing their discoveries, taught them in secret to carefully selected pupils. Their motives for adopting that policy are readily intelligible, even if the merits of the policy may seem still open to discussion. At all events, their teaching has not been forgotten; it has been transmitted by secret initiation to men of our own time, and while its methods and its practical achievements remain secrets in their hands, it is open to any patient and earnest student of the question to satisfy himself that these methods are of supreme efficacy, and these achievements far more admirable than any yet standing to the credit of modern science. (Introduction)"

"The trials through which the neophyte has to pass are no fantastic mockeries, or mimicries of awful peril. Nor, do I take it, are they artificial barriers set up by the masters of occultism, to try the nerve of their pupils, as a riding-master might put up fences in his school. It is inherent in the nature of the science that has to be explored, that its revelations shall stagger the reason and try the most resolute courage. It is in his own interest that the candidate's character and fixity of purpose, and perhaps his physical and mental attributes, are tested and watched with infinite care and patience in the first instance, before he is allowed to take the final plunge into the sea of strange experiences through which he must swim with the strength of his own right arm, or perish. (Occultism and the Adepts I)"

"For the present let us consider the position of the adepts as they now exist, or, to use the designation more generally employed in India, of "the Mahatmas." [Mahatma -Great Soul, or Great Spirit, derived from Maha and Atma.] They constitute a Brotherhood, or Secret Association, which ramifies all over the East, but the principal seat of which for the present I gather to be in Tibet. But India has not yet been deserted by the adepts, and from that country they still receive many recruits. For the great fraternity is at once the least and the most exclusive organization in the world, and fresh recruits from any race or country are welcome, provided they possess the needed qualifications. The door, as I have been told by one who is himself an adept, is always open to the right man who knocks, but the road that has to be travelled before the door is reached is one which none but very determined travellers can hope to pass. It is manifestly impossible that I can describe its perils in any but very general terms, but it is not necessary to have learned any secrets of initiation to understand the character of the training through which a neophyte must pass before he attains the dignity of a proficient in occultism. The adept is not made: he becomes, as I have been constantly assured, and the process of becoming is mainly in his own hands. (Occultism and the Adepts II)"

"One who undertakes to represent certain results of scientific spiritual research of the kind recorded in this book, must above all things be prepared to find that this kind of investigation is at the present time almost universally regarded as impossible. For things are related in the following pages about which those who are today esteemed exact thinkers, assert that they will probably remain altogether indeterminable by human intelligence. One who knows and can respect the reasons which prompt many a serious person to assert this impossibility, would fain make the attempt again and again to show what misunderstandings are really at the bottom of the belief that it is not given to human knowledge to penetrate into the superphysical worlds. (Preface to the Fourth Edition)"

"At the present time the words “occult science” are apt to arouse the most varied feelings. Upon some people they work like a magic charm, like the announcement of something to which they feel attracted by the innermost powers of their soul; to others there is in the words something repellent, calling forth contempt, derision, or a compassionate smile. By many, occult science is looked upon as a lofty goal of human effort, the crown of all other knowledge and cognition; others, who are devoting themselves with the greatest earnestness and noble love of truth to that which appears to them true science, deem occult science mere idle dreaming and fantasy, in the same category with what is called superstition. To some, occult science is like a light without which life would be valueless; to others, it represents a spiritual danger, calculated to lead astray immature minds and weak souls, while between these two extremes is to be found every possible intermediate shade of opinion. (Chapter I. The Character of Occult Science)"

"Through occult science man gains the conviction that from a higher standpoint the weal and woe of the individual are intimately bound up with the weal and woe of the whole world. This is a means by which man comes to see that he is inflicting an injury on the entire world and every being within it, if he does not develop his own powers in the right way. If a man makes his life desolate by losing touch with the unseen, he not only destroys in his inner self something, the decay of which may eventually drive him to despair, but through his weakness he constitutes a hindrance to the evolution of the whole world in which he lives. (Chapter I. The Character of Occult Science)"

"It is impossible to know anything in the occult sense of the present and future of human or planetary evolution without understanding that evolution in the past. For, that which presents itself to the occult student's observation when he watches the hidden events of the past, contains at the same time everything that he can learn of the present and future. In this book we have spoken of the Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth evolutions. We cannot follow the evolution of the earth, as the occultist understands it, unless we observe the events of preceding evolutionary periods. For what meets us today, within the bounds of our earthly globe, comprises in a certain sense the facts of the evolution of the Moon, Sun and Saturn. The beings and things that took part in the evolution of the Moon have gone on developing, and all that now belongs to the earth, is the outcome of that development. (Chapter VI. The Present and Future Evolution of the World and of Humanity)"

"Everything which the ego is able to unfold within itself must give birth to love. The all-embracing archetype of love is set forth in the revelation of... the Christ Mystery. Through Him the germ of love is planted in the innermost core of the human being; and from this starting-point it must flow through the whole of evolution. Just as the wisdom previously formed manifests in the forces of the earthly sense-world, in the “elementary forces” of to-day, so love itself will manifest in the future, in all phenomena, as the new “elementary force.” p. 401 (Chapter VI. The Present and Future Evolution of the World and of Humanity)"

"The secret of all future development is a recognition that everything achieved by man from a right comprehension of evolution is a sowing of seed which must ripen into love. And the greater the amount of love-force, so much the greater will be the creative force available for the future. In that which will grow from love, will lie the mighty forces leading to that culminating point of spiritualization described above. The greater the amount of spiritual knowledge that flows into human and terrestrial evolution, so much more living and fruitful seed will be stored up for the future. Spiritual knowledge is transmuted through its own nature into love... The wisdom of the outer world becomes inner wisdom in man from the Earth period onward and when it is concentrated in him, it becomes the germ of love. Wisdom is the necessary preliminary condition for love; love is the fruit of wisdom, reborn in the ego. p. 402 (Chapter VI. The Present and Future Evolution of the World and of Humanity)"

"Inter-stellar space is filled with this pure 'Light-Essence.' It is not dark and in chaos, as has been the ignorant, limited concept of puny human intellects. This Great Sea of Universal Light - that exists everywhere throughout Infinity — is constantly being drawn into form, and given a quality of one kind or another, according to the way the electrons are held around a central point or core by Love. The number of electrons which combine with each other in a specific atom is the result of, and determined by, conscious thought. The rate at which they whirl around the central core is the result of and determined by feeling. The intensity of the drawing and whirling motion within the central core is the 'Breath of God' and therefore, the most Concentrated Activity of Divine Love. Speaking in scientific terms it would be called centripetal force. These are the determining factors which make the quality of an atom."

"The importance of keeping a feeling of peace, love, and serenity in the personal self cannot be emphasized too strongly for when this is done the 'Mighty God Presence Within' can act without limit in an instant. The continual outpouring of a Feeling of Peace and Divine Love to every person and everything unconditionally, no matter whether you think it be deserved or not, is the Magic Key that unlocks the door and releases instantly this 'Tremendous Inner God-Power.' Fortunate indeed is he who has learned this 'Law', for he then seeks to BE All Peace and Love. Without It humanity has nothing good, and with It they have all things 'Perfect.' Harmony is the Keynote — the 'One Great Law of Life.' Upon It rests all Perfect Manifestation, and without It all form disintegrates and returns into the Great Sea of Universal Light."

"Try to think upon this Power, which is within you. Call into use the Great Sea of Universal Substance from which you may draw without limit. It obeys, without exception, the direction of thought, and records any quality imposed upon it, through the activity of the feeling nature in mankind. Universal Substance is obedient to your conscious will at all times. It is constantly responding to humanity's thought and feeling whether they realize it or not. There is no instant at which human beings are not giving this Substance one quality or another, and it is only through the knowledge that the individual has conscious control and manipulation of a Limitless Sea of It that he begins to understand the possibilities of his own Creative Powers, and the responsibilities resting upon him in the use of his thought and feeling.""

"Curiosity, rebellion against holding true to the Divine Pattern and the use of thought and feeling in creation of imperfection, began the building of what you call the 'soul'. It is a consciousness apart from the full Purity of God. The first thought a man had that was imperfect and impure, energized by a secret feeling, was a cause and that, sent out into the atmosphere, created an effect. Like a boomerang, the effect came back into the consciousness and made a record. That record was the beginning of an impression. Energy sent out in a certain manner returned to affect the lifestream who had sent it forth and there began to be created a shadow between the I AM Presence and the human consciousness. Endeavoring to contact the Presence, the individual would find these 'tramp' thoughts and feelings flowing through that line of contact until more and more imperfect was the conscious use of them. Finally, those centers got completely away from the control of the ego and acted independently. Anything the individual saw, registered on the mind, was energized by feelings, and manifested. Acting independently of the I AM Presence, thought and feeling created most of the conditions in which you are functioning today."

"Through the ages, blessed children, the creation of thought forms and the energizing of those forms by feeling, as well as the action that follows through the flesh, has built an etheric consciousness. The 'soul' is the accumulated consciousness resulting from your experimental use of life, action and reaction. The tendencies, habits and nature of your soul are determined by the ways in which you have used life through the centuries and what life has returned to you, age after age."

"Your 'soul' endures in embodiment and between embodiment. Your 'soul' will continue to live until it is transmuted by the Flame in your heart and there is no longer this shadow self that thinks and feels apart from the Christ. Your 'soul' lives through every personality (embodiment) that you use. Today you have a name, you were born into a family, you live - if fortunate - approximately threescore and ten years and then you 'pass away' as a personality. That personality is no more, but the 'soul' of you, in the etheric garment, influences each personality which you become in each succeeding incarnation. If you were to look at an unbroken stream of one hundred of your Earth lives, you would find that the 'soul' was more or less the same through each personality."

"Now we have to undo the effect of millions and millions of these embodiments, in the matter of a few short years! We are endeavoring to teach you to enter, again, into the Authority of your own I AM Consciousness, drawing Primal Life and getting directions from your Presence. You must learn to silence the cravings of your lower bodies, the etheric rumblings, the human tendencies. Then, in the mastery and control of your own life, you must begin to build anew, as your God Self would have you do, until there are not two - the 'soul' and God - BUT GOD ALONE. Thus, are you reinstated as the I AM Consciousness, Master of thought, feeling and action, absolutely non-recordant to the impressions of the human selves of others, - these vicious conditions of the etheric bodies which manifest as disease of flesh and distress of affairs.""

"Within the Life of every human being is the Power by which he can express all that the Ascended Masters express every moment — if he but chooses to do so. All Life contains Will but only Self-Conscious Life is free to determine upon its own course of expression. Hence, the individual has free choice to express either in the human, limited body or the Super-Human, Divine Body. He is the chooser of his own field of expression. He is the Self-determining Creator. He has willed and chosen to live as Self-Conscious Life."

"When one individualizes within the Absolute, All-Pervading Life he chooses of his own free will to become an intensified individual focus of Self-Conscious Intelligence. He is the conscious director of his future activities. Thus, having once made his choice, he is the only one who can fulfill that Destiny - which is not inflexible circumstance but a definitely designed Plan of Perfection. It is a blueprint which he elects to express in the realm of form and action. So you see, my son, a human being may at any time determine to rise out of his human qualities or limitations, and if he will give all of his Life, his Energy, to that determination he will succeed. Those of us who have raised the body accomplished the Ascension by giving all unto the God-Self Within - and hence, It expresses through us Its Perfect Qualities — 'The Divine Plan of Life.' . . . The human body with its faculties is God's Temple of Energy — which the 'Great God Presence' provides — and through this outer self It wishes to express a Perfect Divine Plan or Design."

"I predict most authoritarian followers would sail right through this book and compartmentalize, misinterpret, rationalize, and dogmatically deny it had anything to do with them personally. If you tried to force this self-awareness on them, they would probably run away, run away, as fast as they could. So good luck if you passed on this URL to your fascist Uncle George."

"Our most urgent problem just now is how to preserve in a positive and critical form the soul of truth in the two great traditions, classical and Christian, that are crumbling as mere dogma."

"All teaching is dogmatic. Dogma, indeed, means only "a thing taught," and teaching not dogmatic would cease to be teaching and would become discussion and doubt."

"To Dogmatism the Spirit of Inquiry is the same as the Spirit of Evil."

"Yes, of course, the Christian has dogmas he must believe in order to be a Christian, but all those dogmas concern love which is the essence. God is love. Where love is, God is. Dogmas and tenets of the Christian faith without love are dead letters, not even worth spelling out."

"Yield not one inch to all the forces which conspire to make you an echo. That is the sin of dogmatism and creeds. Avoid them; they build a fence about the intellect."

"No priestly dogmas, invented on purpose to tame and subdue the rebellious reason of mankind, ever shocked common sense more than the doctrine of the infinitive divisibility of extension, with its consequences; as they are pompously displayed by all geometricians and metaphysicians, with a kind of triumph and exultation. A real quantity, infinitely less than any finite quantity, containing quantities infinitely less than itself, and so on in infinitum; this is an edifice so bold and prodigious, that it is too weighty for any pretended demonstration to support, because it shocks the clearest and most natural principles of human reason."

"Christian dogmatics, it seems to me, must grow out of Christ's activity, and all the more so because Christ did not establish any doctrine; he acted."

"Religion does not mean to surrender to dogmas and religious scriptures or conformity to rituals. But my religion constitutes an abiding faith in the perfect values of truth and the ceaseless attempt to realise them in the inner most part of our nature."

"We can indeed recognize a tremendous difference in manner, but not in principle, between a shaman of the Tunguses and a European prelate: … for, as regards principle, they both belong to one and the same class, namely, the class of those who let their worship of God consist in what in itself can never make man better (in faith in certain statutory dogmas or celebration of certain arbitrary observances). Only those who mean to find the service of God solely in the disposition to good life-conduct distinguish themselves from those others, by virtue of having passed over to a wholly different principle."

"Though Dogma and theology are things intimately related and can never be separated, yet they are never entirely of the same stuff. Dogma is a vast domain which theology will never wholly exploit. There is always infinitely more in Dogma, considered in its concrete totality, that is to say, in the very Object of divine revelation, than in this "human science of revelation", in this product of analysis and rational elaboration which theology always is. The latter, in its very truth, will always—and all the more in that it will always be rationally formulated—be inadequate for Dogma; for it is indeed the explanation of it, but not the fulness. This weakness is congenital. True theology knows that. It does not confuse the orders."

"Government is a true religion: it has its dogmas, its mysteries, and its ministers. To annihilate it or submit it to the discussion of each individual is the same thing; it lives only through national reason, that is to say through political faith, which is a creed."

"What is dogma but the intellectual conception and verbal expression of a divine truth?"

"The mind petrifies if a circle be drawn around it, and it can hardly be denied that dogma draws a circle round the mind."

"The word dogma comes from the Greek verb dokein, to seem to be, to appear to be. A dogma, therefore, was something which appeared to be a truth: an opinion about truth, and hence was frequently employed in certain Greek states as signifying the decision, the considered opinion, and therefore the final vote arrived at in a state council or assembly. It was only in later times that the word dogma acquired the meaning which it now has: a doctrine based upon the declaration of an ecumenical council, or perhaps of some other widely recognized churchly authority."

"By propagating the dogma of Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God, the Church contradicts the very sense of the prayer given to us by Jesus Christ himself, "Our Father which art in heaven." And also the words of the Scriptures, "So God created man in his own image." (Genesis 1:27)"

"To be a philosopher, that is to say, a lover of wisdom (for wisdom is nothing but truth), it is not enough for a man to love truth, in so far as it is compatible with his own interest, with the will of his superiors, with the dogmas of the church, or with the prejudices and tastes of his contemporaries; so long as he rests content with this position, he is only a φίλαυτος, not a φιλόσοφος. For this title of honor is well and wisely conceived precisely by its stating that one should love the truth earnestly and with one’s whole heart, and thus unconditionally and unreservedly, above all else, and, if need be, in defiance of all else. Now the reason for this is the one previously stated that the intellect has become free, and in this state it does not even know or understand any other interest than that of truth."

"Yesterday a conversation about divinity and faith suggested to me a great, a stupendous idea to the realization of which I feel capable of dedicating my whole life. This is the idea—the founding of a new religion corresponding to the development of mankind: the religion of Christ, but purged of all dogma and mystery, a practical religion, not promising future bliss but realizing bliss on earth."

"The mechanical philosophy is a case of being victimized by metaphor. I choose Descartes and Newton as excellent examples of metaphysicians of mechanism malgré eux, that is to say, as unconscious victims of the metaphor of the great machine. Together they have founded a church, more powerful than that founded by Peter and Paul, whose dogmas are now so entrenched that anyone who tries to reallocate the facts is guilty of more than heresy."

"I really dread serious people. Especially serious, dogmatic people. I regard them as sort of what Reich called the emotional plague. I regard them as very dangerous."

"I have never figured out why people want to believe in the supernatural. It’s as if they find the existence of the irrational somehow reassuring."

"“Why are you so certain this is all a hoax?” Prang asked, as we slipped between the twisted bars. “Ninety-seven percent of all supernatural events are crude hoaxes,” I said. “What about the other three percent?” “Clever hoaxes,” I said."

"Man's need of self-esteem entails the need for a sense of control over reality – but no control is possible in a universe which, by one's own concession, contains the supernatural, the miraculous and the causeless, a universe in which one is at the mercy of ghosts and demons, in which one must deal, not with the unknown, but with the unknowable; no control is possible if man proposes, but a ghost disposes; no control is possible if the universe is a haunted house."

"I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural."

"The justification for naturalism is that it works: we have never understood anything about the universe by assuming the supernatural, while assuming naturalism as a working hypothesis has moved our understanding ever forward."

"The practical track record of naturalistic science is available for all to evaluate, while supernatural science comes up empty handed. Indeed, the enterprise of science is to turn unknowns into knowns, while the business of supernaturalism is to make pronouncements concerning what cannot be known and which therefore requires magic. In other words, it is not unfair to accuse supernaturalists of “bias against the natural.”"

"To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer."

"Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is ‘paranormal’."

"All supernaturalism is simply a scheme to enable a class of magicians called priests to live without working."

"Twenty-six years ago knew and noted in writing what was unknown to any of those who had written on the subject in any language, in the seven centuries which have elapsed since the eclipse of this so-called heresy. All writers who mentioned the subject insisted that the robes of Cathar priests were inevitably black. For twenty-six years, including her six years of correspondence with me, she stubbornly maintained that they were dark blue. She was proved correct by Jean Duvernoy of Toulouse but only in the last four years. In editing the register of the Inquisition of Jacques Fournier, Monsieur Duvernoy revealed that Cathar priests wore sometimes dark blue or dark green. This book was published in 1965. She expressed it in writing more than a year before publication of Duvornoy's book."

"It is surprising how petty some of the “supernatural” miracles now seem."

"The most important of all ideas about the natural universe—that the world around us was something we could understand, rather than a magical place where events could have supernatural causes."

"To me, the benefit of discussing creationism is limited because my sense is that on this issue, there is little room for persuasion and therefore little value to continued discussion. People who adopt supernatural beliefs, it seems to me, tend to adopt them for reasons other than their evaluation of the relevant evidence and logic, so presenting evidence and logic has limited persuasive value. This debate really ended a century ago, when the Enlightenment teed up supernaturalism and Darwin spiked it. The discussion is, to my mind, over, and dissenters are simply history’s stragglers less interested in discovering truth than defending a worldview."

"If we were to accept the supernatural or extranatural proposals of anti-evolutionists, it would provide little useful information to help us understand the history and diversity of life, and it would put an end to all research into the matter."

"I was a little dazed by this coincidence, but did not become terrified. It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive short cut of supernaturalism."

"The rose’s fragrance, the garden’s lushness, and the night sky’s grandeur affect us because we are built to appreciate beauty and to experience awe. To leap to a supernatural source for these powerful but ordinary feelings is to indulge in wishful thinking, romantic embellishment, and metaphoric fantasizing."

"I think we’re yearning for something beyond the every day. And I will tell you that I don’t believe in the “supernatural,” I believe in the “supernormal.” To me there is nothing that goes against nature. If it seems incomprehensible, it’s because we haven’t been able to understand it yet."

"The more science uncovers, the less places the ‘supernatural’ can hide. Sadly, people still cling to 1st century mythology. We should be centuries past the point of supernatural explanations being the default assumption. We should be at the point of considering supernatural explanations as extraordinary explanations that require extraordinary evidence. But religion concocts its own version of science to keep their followers ignorant and under control and unwilling to ask critical questions."

"And they also overlook the fact that, in the entire history of the advancement of human knowledge, which has indeed (as Kuhn illustrates) meant abandoning earlier theories when new data falsifies them, there is not a single example of a naturalistic explanation having to be abandoned in favour of a supernatural one. Not once. Not ever."

"This vulgar misrepresentation—often deliberate—of A Brief History of Time reflects a very sad, profoundly disturbing aspect of American society: Science illiteracy is so ubiquitous, and religious dogma so firmly ingrained, that legions cannot read a well-written science book without hallucinating the supernatural on every page."

"No natural phenomenon, not one, has ever been shown to have a supernatural cause based on objective, material evidence."

"Religion does not complement science but preempts and co-opts scientific discourse in support of supernaturalism."

"“Man’s responsibility increases as that of the gods decreases” (quoting André Gide). Every step taken by science claims territory once occupied by the supernatural."

"So I had to face the fact that I was blessed with abilities that were considered symptoms of emotional abnormality or mental derangement by psychology, often thought of as demonic by religion, and whose very existence was denied altogether by science. So in my darker moments I used to think that my psychic initiation and subsequent experiences were a mixed bag, to say the least. But the fact is that I was very sensitive to criticism for the very good reason that often I shared many of the beliefs that stimulated it."

"The most parsimonious explanation for why science has been unable to confirm anything supernatural is because the supernatural doesn’t exist."

"The eventual development of a clear concept of the supernatural in Christian theology was promoted both by dialogues with heretics and by the influence of Neoplatonic philosophy."

"Saint Thomas’s important contribution to the emergence of a technical theology of the supernatural represents a special development of the concept of surpassing effects. Saint Thomas and others of the Scholastics have left us as one of their legacies a dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural that is theologically rooted in the distinction between the Order of Nature and the Order of Grace."

"He couldn’t believe in ghosts or demons. He knew that supernatural happenings tended to break down, under detailed examination, into eminently natural events. The ones that didn’t break down—stopped. Ghosts just wouldn’t stand still and let a nonbeliever examine them. The phantom of the castle was invariably on vacation when a scientist showed up with cameras and tape recorders."

"If IDers eschew all attempts to provide a naturalistic explanation for life, they abandon science altogether. There is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal. There is only the natural, the normal, and mysteries we have yet to explain."

"Scientific explanations are often complicated and require training and effort to work through. Superstition and belief in fate and the supernatural provide a simpler path through life’s complex maze."

"If you admit the supernatural into your calculations, anything goes. That is why a supernatural explanation is useless to a scientist, however pious he may be on Sundays. It provides no direction for research, suggests no testable hypotheses, and gives no reason to expect one result rather than another from any observation or experiment."

"Catholic theologians sometimes call supernatural the miraculous way in which certain effects, in themselves natural, are produced, or certain endowments (like man's immunity from death, suffering, passion, and ignorance) that bring the lower class up to the higher though always within the limits of the created, but they are careful in qualifying the former as accidentally supernatural (supernaturale per accidens) and the latter as relatively supernatural (prœternaturale). For a concept of the substantially and absolutely supernatural, they start from a comprehensive view of the natural order taken, in its amplest acceptation, for the aggregate of all created entities and powers, including the highest natural endowments of which the rational creature is capable, and even such Divine operations as are demanded by the effective carrying out of the cosmic order. The supernatural order is then more than a miraculous way of producing natural effects, or a notion of relative superiority within the created world, or the necessary concurrence of God in the universe; it is an effect or series of effects substantially and absolutely above all nature and, as such, calls for an exceptional intervention and gratuitous bestowal of God and rises in a manner to the Divine order, the only one that transcends the whole created world... It is obvious also that this uplifting of the rational creature to the supernatural order cannot be by way of absorption of the created into the Divine or of fusion of both into a sort of monistic identity, but only by way of union or participation, the two terms remaining perfectly distinct."

"Thought, as a subtle juggler, makes us deem Things supernatural, which have cause Common as sickness."

"People are gradually beginning to realize that these sightings are not bunk. I thought it was bunk until I saw one … Now don't tell me I had been drinking tequila, or that I was seeing spots before my eyes! … you did not offer any explanation for the saucers. Thus far, there certainly is no adequate explanation. All I can say is that if one ever actually sees one, he has seen the most awe-inspiring, strange and unaccountable sight that he'll ever see in his lifetime. … Space does not permit me to go into detail as to why the object was not a balloon, a kite, a plane, or some such object. … I have lost so much sleep thinking about the contraption, I wish I had never seen the darn thing in the first place."

"It is with considerable disappointment you cannot give the explanation of these aircraft as I felt certain they belonged to our government. They have apparently meant no harm, but used as an instrument of destruction in combination with our atomic bomb the effects could destroy life on our planet. ... We have not taken this lightly. It is to us of very serious concern, as we are as interested in the welfare of our country as you are."

"If our government knows anything about these devices, the people should be told at once. A lot of people out here are very much disturbed. Some think these things may be from another planet. But they aren't harming anyone and I think it would be the wrong thing to shoot one of them down – even if it can be done. Their high speed would completely wreck them."

"… well, right here we’ve seen something, I’ve seen something, hundreds of pilots have seen something … in the skies. We have dutifully reported these things. And we have to have 15 million witnesses before anybody is going to look into the problem … seriously? Well this is utterly fantastic. This is more fantastic than flying saucers or people from Venus or anything as far as I am concerned."

"The (British) government took the threat of UFOs so seriously in the 1950s that UK intelligence chiefs met to discuss the issue, newly-released files show... Ministers even went on to commission weekly reports on UFO sightings from a committee of intelligence experts... the papers also include a wartime account claiming prime minister Winston Churchill ordered a UFO sighting be kept secret to prevent "mass panic"... the latest batch of UFO files released from the Ministry of Defence to the National Archives shows that, in 1957, the committee received reports detailing an average of one UFO sighting a week... The files also include an account of a wartime meeting attended by Winston Churchill in which, it is claimed, the prime minister was so concerned about a reported encounter between a UFO and RAF bombers, that he ordered it be kept secret for at least 50 years to prevent "mass panic". Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFO sightings for the MoD, said: "The interesting thing is that most of the UFO files from that period have been destroyed... But what happened is that a scientist whose grandfather was one of his [Churchill's] bodyguards, said look, Churchill and Eisenhower got together to cover up this phenomenal UFO sighting, that was witnessed by an RAF crew on their way back from a bombing raid...The reason apparently was because Churchill believed it would cause mass panic and it would shatter people's religious views."

"With hundreds of thousands of nebulae, each containing thousands of millions of suns, the odds are enormous that there must be immense numbers which possess planets whose circumstances would not render life impossible... I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilization here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time."

"[I wonder whether the work the EO did covering the Arnold sighting may have been the pinnacle of press coverage of the UFO phenomenon, and whether the coverage has been in decline ever since. Today’s press coverage of UFOs is lamentable.] For the life of me, I cannot understand why members of the press are not clamoring for information about the UFO issue. [The disinterest of the press] is even more interesting than the apparent presence on our planet of the UFOs themselves."

"Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers — because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said "I don't think there are flying saucers'. So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?" "No", I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely". At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?" But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence." It is just more likely. That is all."

"Anyway, I have to argue about flying saucers on the beach with people, you know. And I was interested in this: they keep arguing that it is possible. And that's true. It is possible. They do not appreciate that the problem is not to demonstrate whether it's possible or not but whether it's going on or not."

"Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time. They are not hostile towards us, rather, they want to help us but we have not grown enough in order to establish direct contact with them.”"

"Decades ago, visitors from other planets warned us about where we were headed and offered to help. But instead we, or at least some of us, interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after… The veil of secrecy must be lifted and it has to be lifted now, before it is too late."

"They are very much afraid we might be stupid enough to start using atomic weapons again and that would be very bad for us and them as well... We are polluting our waters and our air, and we are playing around with these exotic weapons… and they [space brothers] don't like that. They'd like to work with us to teach us better ways, but only, I think, with our consent."

"(How do you answer UFO skeptics?) I get them to read my books and others; because there’s so much literature on the subject, that it is just amazing. And the skeptics, by large, have never done any reading on it. And it’s just like, take any other subject, physics or something that you are not familiar with, you can be skeptical of some of the rules and things people say if you haven’t taken time out to learn about it.... You have to read the books and get the evidence, and then you can check it out for yourself."

"There’s all kinds of proof, but only if you know where to look and taken the trouble to go and look... The United States government is the principle villain. Why is a good question, you should ask them, because basically, at a hearing we held a couple of years ago in Washington, the consensus of the witnesses at the hearing, of whom I was one, was that it was power and greed. They cover it up under the cloak of national security, but we all, I think the consensus of all of us who gave evidence there was that it had nothing to do with national security, it was a cover story to keep people from demanding answers, and that the real reasons were power and greed."

"Recently, the press has been filled with reports of sightings of flying saucers. While we need not give credence to these stories, they allow our imagination to speculate on how visitors from outer space would judge us. I am afraid they would be stupefied at our conduct. They would observe that for death planning we spend billions to create engines and strategies for war. They would also observe that we spend millions to prevent death by disease and other causes. Finally they would observe that we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet. Our visitors from outer space could be forgiven if they reported home that our planet is inhabited by a race of insane men whose future is bleak and uncertain."

"After a couple of years of intense research into eyewitness accounts of dramatic flying saucer sightings and encounters, it started to dawn on me, dimly at first, that science is not a democracy. It doesn’t really matter how many people have reported observations if the observations make no physical sense. We don’t take a vote to see if flying saucer attributes, such as antigravity, force fields, and speeds of thousands of miles per hour in the lower atmosphere, are technically achievable. Such features either exist or they do not, and they are judged on compatibility with existing proofs and the results of confirmatory research. There are many strange and even unbelievable phenomena that have been proven and re-proven to exist in the nuclear physics model of the universe, but the capabilities of your common flying saucer are not in this set."

"Along with the briefcase with the nuclear codes, the President of the country is given a special ‘top secret’ folder which is entirely devoted to the extra-terrestrials who visited our planet. The report is provided by the special secret service which deals with the extra-terrestrials in our country."

"I happen to be privileged enough to be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomenon is real, although it’s been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it's leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it."

"I've been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes - we have been visited. Reading the papers recently, it's been happening quite a bit."

"Hypnotism will become more and more a tool of scientific investigation. Telepathy will be proven without a doubt, and utilized, sadly enough in the beginning, for purposes of war and intrigue. Nevertheless telepathy will enable your race to make its first contact with alien intelligence."

"When science progresses on various planes, then such visitations become less accidental and more planned. However, since the inhabitants of each plane are bound by the particular materialized patterns of their 'home,' they bring this pattern of camouflaged vitality with them. Certain kinds of science cannot operate without it. When the inhabitants of a plane have learned mental science patterns, then they are to a great degree freed from the more regular camouflage patterns … the flying saucer appearances come from a system much more advanced in technological sciences than yours. So strong is this tendency for vitality to change from one apparent form to another, that what you have here in your flying saucers is something that is actually not of your plane nor of the plane of its origins. What happens is this: When the 'flying saucer' starts out toward its destination, the atoms and molecules that compose it (and which are themselves formed by vitality) are more or less aligned according to the pattern inflicted upon it by its own territory. As it enters your plane, a distortion occurs. The actual structure of the craft is caught in a dilemma of form. It is caught between transforming itself completely into earth's particular camouflage pattern, and retaining its original pattern."

"Unknown aerial objects have in fact been observed over many of our nuclear weapons bases and other nuclear facilities, and in some cases the appearance of these objects coincided with compromising the operational readiness of our nuclear weapons… If they wanted to destroy them, with all the powers they seem to have, they could have done that job. So I personally don’t think that it was a hostile intent."

"What struck me more than the book's UFO stories, however, was the common thread weaving among them of breathtaking alterations in consciousness associated with the experiences – sensations of leaving the body, of flying through the air or being "carried along by the wind," and receiving "startling and novel insights into the nature of reality" that reverberated thereafter with profound, life-changing effects."

"(Gardner) writes about various kinds of cranks with the conscious superiority of the scientist, and in most cases one can share his sense of the victory of reason. But after half a dozen chapters this non-stop superiority begins to irritate; you begin to wonder about the standards that make him so certain he is always right. He asserts that the scientist, unlike the crank, does his best to remain open-minded. So how can he be so sure that no sane person has ever seen a flying saucer, or used a dowsing rod to locate water? And that all the people he disagrees with are unbalanced fanatics? A colleague of the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer once remarked wryly "I wish I was as certain of anything as he seems to be about everything". Martin Gardner produces the same feeling."

"These left me in no doubt that something was trying to communicate with us, but that direct communication would be counterproductive. It seemed to be an important part of the scheme to create a sense of mystery."

"Do you know why I can't stand ufologists? Because with very rare exceptions they are stupendously, hopelessly, spectacularly incompetent. And with their noisy incompetence they do nothing but make ridiculous a field of inquiry that could be serious if only they stopped talking nonsense and mistaking every blurred pixel for a trip out of town by the Venusians. If, then, journalists, instead of uncritically reporting the aforementioned nonsense, deigned to have a moment of critical sense instead of being whores of the click, ufology could finally become a science instead of a nonsense. Not at all. [...] Formulating hypotheses is the duty of every researcher; But the true researcher also goes one step further, which is to try to discard hypotheses that are not supported by the facts and to put them to the test, instead of jumping to conclusions. That's what's wrong with ufology: it's loudly propagandized by people who are so enamored with their worldview that they ignore the most basic methods of verification; so fervent that they are able to write down what they should do and then not do; so fixed on the single track of their own thought that they do not notice their mistakes and instead accuse others of not having an open mind; They are so self-centered that they get when someone dares to point out their mistakes. Few escape this model [...]. Feel, fufologists [...], but it's not my fault that you write rubbish and make a fool of yourself. And get, journalists, but it's not my fault if you publish any nonsense without verifying it. (Paolo Attivissimo)"

"Denzler, Brenda (C.E.2003). The lure of the edge: scientific passions, religious beliefs, and the pursuit of UFOs. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-23905-9."

"Hynek, J. Allen (C.E.1998). The UFO experience: a scientific inquiry. Da Capo Press. ISBN 1-56924-782-X."

"Vallée, Jacques F. (C.E.1991). Confrontations: A Scientist's Search for Alien Contact. Random House Value Publishing. ISBN 0-517-07204-1."

"Klass, Philip J. (C.E.1983). UFOs: The Public Deceived. Prometheus Books. ISBN 0-87975-322-6."

"Sheaffer, Robert (C.E.1986). The UFO Verdict: Examining the Evidence. Prometheus Books. ISBN 0-87975-338-2."

"Graff, Garrett (C.E.2023). UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There. New York: Avid Reader Press. ISBN 9781982196776. OCLC 1407420009."

"Rutledge, Harley D. (C.E.1981). Project Identification: The First Scientific Field Study of UFO Phenomena. Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-13-730705-5."

"Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don't know whether it's a new thing, but it's certainly a current thing, in that it doesn't seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the president because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?"

"Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible."

"The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.""

"You must remember, once more, that expectations are the blocks with which you build your reality. There are no exceptions to this rule."

"When I consider the Question, Whether there are such Persons in the World as those we call Witches? my Mind is divided between the two opposite Opinions; or rather (to speak my Thoughts freely) I believe in general that there is, and has been such a thing as Witchcraft; but at the same time can give no Credit to any Particular Instance of it."

"Now, it's common knowledge that most towns of a certain size have a witch, if only to eat misbehaving children and the occasional puppy who wanders into her yard. Witches use those bones to cast spells and curses that make the land infertile... Yet of all the witches in Alabama, there was one who was the most feared. For she had one glass eye, which was said to contain mystical powers."

"WITCH, n. (1) Any ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with the devil. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil."

"Witch. From the Anglo-Saxon word wicce, German wissen, “to know”, and wikken, “to divine”. The witches were at first called “wise women”, until the day when the Church took it unto herself to follow the law of Moses, which put every “witch” or enchantress to death."

"Witches’ Sabbath. The supposed festival and gathering of witches in some lonely spot, where the witches were accused of conferring directly with the Devil. Every race and people believed in it, and some believe in it still. Thus the chief headquarters and place of meeting of all the witches in Russia is said to be the Bald Mountain (Lyssaya Gorâ), near Kief, and in Germany the Brocken, in the Harz Mountains. In old Boston, U.S.A., they met near the “Devil’s Pond ”, in a large forest which has now disappeared. At Salem, they were put to death almost at the will of the Church Elders, and in South Carolina a witch was burnt as late as 1865. In Germany and England they were murdered by Church and State in thousands, being forced to lie and confess under torture their participation in the “ Witches’ Sabbath ”."

"Generals gathered in their masses just like witches at black masses. Evil minds that plot destruction, sorcerer of death's construction."

"Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears."

"We have winning wiles and witcheries, Such incantations as thy sterner wit Did never dream of. Time hath been ere now That Jove hath listen'd to our minstrelsy. Till wrath would seem to drop out of his soul Like a forgotten thing."

"We were apparently rather resistant to the idea of destroying witches in England, unlike views espoused in so-called books — and I use the word "book" very loosely — like The Da Vinci Code. [pretends to spit in disgust] It is complete loose stool water. It is arse-gravy of the worst kind."

"Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men."

"Any prowling maniac would have had more than his work cut out if he had accosted Anathema Device. She was a witch, after all. And precisely because she was a witch, and therefore sensible, she put little faith in protective amulets and spells; she saved it all for a foot-long bread knife which she kept in her belt."

"The Parliament of Toulouse burned 400 witches at one time. Four hundred women at one hour on the public square, dying the horrid death of fire for a crime which never existed save in the imagination of those persecutors and which grew in their imagination from a false belief in woman’s extraordinary wickedness, based upon a false theory as to original sin."

"Massachusetts was not the only, colony that treated witchcraft as a crime. Maryland, New Jersey and Virginia possessed similar enactments. Witchcraft was considered and treated as a capital offense by the laws of both Pennsylvania and New York, trials taking place in both colonies not long before the Salem tragedy......... Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts and New York, eight of the thirteen colonies recognized witchcraft as a capital crime."

"If a man has put a spell upon another man and it is not yet justified, he upon whom the spell is laid shall go to the holy river; into the holy river shall he plunge. If the holy river overcome him and he is drowned, the man who put the spell upon him shall take possession of his house. If the holy river declares him innocent and he remains unharmed the man who laid the spell shall be put to death. He that plunged into the river shall take possession of the house of him who laid the spell upon him."

""Found among his people certain witches, whom he called in his native tongue Haliurunnae. Suspecting these women, he expelled them from the midst of his race and compelled them to wander in solitary exile afar from his army. There the unclean spirits, who beheld them as they wandered through the wilderness, bestowed their embraces upon them and begat this savage race, which dwelt at first in the swamps, a stunted, foul and puny tribe, scarcely human, and having no language save one which bore but slight resemblance to human speech."

"“Witches are of particular interest in this context because their persecution required an extraordinary degree of credulity to get underway, for the simple reason that a confederacy of witches in medieval Europe seems never to have existed. There were no covens of pagan dissidents, meeting in secret, betrothed to Satan, abandoning themselves to the pleasures of group sex, cannibalism, and the casting of spells upon neighbors, crops, and cattle.”"

"There's a little witch in all of us."

"For me—as I think it is for a lot of women and girls—I felt that they were figures that had power, and I felt very powerless. It was just very exciting and thrilling to think of a witch who didn’t care if she was portrayed as ugly—which of course, I felt like I was—or not beautiful enough or whatever, but still had power and didn’t need to be rescued."

"Let nobody presume to kill a foreign serving maid or female servant as a witch, for it is not possible, nor ought to be believed by Christian minds."

"We need to launch a nationwide campaign against superstition and belief in witchcraft. Nigerians should be told that witches are not real, and that witches and spirits are imaginary entities created by primitive minds during the infancy of human race to explain situations and issues they could not understand or resolve commonsensically. This campaign should be taken to all Nigerian schools, colleges and universities. It should be publicized over the radios and television, in the newspapers, in market places, in churches and mosques. In particular, we need to check the activities of our so called pastors and other self styled men and women of God who use the Bible or Holy books to perpetrate and justify atrocious acts and human right abuses. These religious charlatans continue to act and preach in ways that reinforce the belief in witches and provoke acts of witch accusation, persecution and killing. This has been the driving force in Akwa Ibom State, and until Nigerians learn to reject superstition and irrationalism such tragedies will continue to occur."

"To save the witch-children in Nigeria and rescue this nation from witch-believing forces, we need to get all Nigerians to exercise their common sense, reason and critical intelligence when practicing or professing their religion or belief. This is especially important when they are reading, preaching and interpreting messages and doctrines contained in their holy books."

"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles."

"I am mistress of all the sciences. I go so far beyond all else that my work is called magic. I manipulate noumena, regarding monads as points of entry tangential to hylomorphism. As to the paradox of Primary Essence being contained in Quiddity, the larger in the smaller, I have my own solution. The difficulty is always in not confusing Contingency with Accidence. Do you understand me?" "Sure. You're a witch."

"A study by Rachel Moseley, researcher at the University of Warwick, found that, by the early 2000s, shows like Sabrina and Charmed had created a direct association between witchcraft and the notion of “girl power”. She wrote of her findings: “Historically, witches have been outcasts and much of this unease clearly stems from a fear of female force. The teenage witch genre articulates a new powerful image of femininity. It’s not that the Hag and herb potions have become hip, rather witchcraft has become synonymous with power and girly magic.”"

"Go tell Mankind, that there are Devils and Witches; and that tho those night-birds least appear where the Day-light of the Gospel comes, yet New-Engl. has had Exemples of their Existence and Operation; and that no only the Wigwams of Indians, where the pagan Powaws often raise their masters, in the shapes of Bears and Snakes and Fires, but the House of Christians, where our God has had his constant Worship, have undergone the Annoyance of Evil spirits. Go tell the world, What Prays can do beyond all Devils and Witches, and What it is that these Monsters love to do; and through the Demons in the Audience of several standers-by threatned much disgrace to thy Author, if he let thee come abroad, yet venture That, and in this way seek a just Revenge on Them for the Disturbance they have given to such as have called on the Name of God."

"It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person should be Condemned."

"In Early Modern Europe witchcraft persecution occurred at time of widespread impairment of the health of people and animals. The distribution of illness, often interpreted as a sign of bewitchment, mimics the pattern of the incidence of : it was most common in alpine areas and those with summers in the 17.4°-18.9° C temperature range; a majority of the victims were children and teenagers; and rye was a dietary staple in the areas affected. ... Cold winters traumatize rye and increase the risk of alkaloid formation. Such alkaloids may have caused the symptoms of "bewitchment." When the incidence of these symptoms increased, so did the incidence of witchcraft persecution. We today should avoid the mistake made by the witch-burners of long ago by not overlooking the physical cause for the events that mystify us."

"It struck me that it might be interesting for once to do an almost blue-collar warlock. Somebody who was streetwise, working class, and from a different background than the standard run of comic book mystics. Constantine started to grow out of that."

"Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt."

"One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar and I didn't know it. I mean there was a little blood there, and something like that."

"In response to Tacky’s Rebellion in 1760 in Jamaica, the colony’s House of Assembly passed a law naming a new crime, “obeah.” This important statute led the way in establishing obeah as a phenomenon understood by colonial authorities as a singular and dangerous problem. Investigating the Jamaica assembly’s decision within a wider Caribbean and Atlantic context and alongside the near-contemporaneous “Makandal conspiracy” in Saint Domingue, which was interpreted by French planters as a mass outbreak of poisoning, shows how similar practices came to be interpreted and constructed in different ways in different colonial cultures. The practices used by Tacky’s “obeah man” and Makandal’s followers were conceptually and practically similar, deriving from African understandings of medicine in which substances could be imbued with spiritual power. Why, then, did the French colonists emphasize poison while the British emphasized obeah (which they glossed with the term “witchcraft”)?"

"The Inquisition was established not just for the persecution of pitiful witches and sorcerers (mostly mediums), but for the annihilation of all the differently minded people, and all personal enemies of the representatives of the church, the latter having decided to obtain absolute power. First of all, among the so-called enemies of the church were the most enlightened minds, those who were working for the General Welfare, and the true followers of the Testaments of Christ. Indeed, the easiest way to destroy the enemy was by accusing him of being in league with the devil. This devilish psychology the so-called "Guardians of the purity of Christian Principles" attempted to instill into the consciousness of the masses in every possible way. Small wonder that in those days the visions of the nuns and monks had the stamp of the Satanic influence, as they were full of devilish images and all sorts of ugly temptations."

"Sorcerer, you do have magical powers, but where is your sense? How on earth could you think of going to do sorcery at Ereš, which is the city of Nisaba, a city whose destiny was decreed by An and Enlil, the primeval city, the beloved city of Ninlil?"

"What the Malleus comes down to, pretty much, is that if you’re accused of witchcraft, you’re a witch. Torture is an unfailing means to demonstrate the validity of the accusation."

"Most people think witches are a coven of lesbians dancing naked in the forest celebrating the semen stolen from imprisoned hypnotized males, which they then use to inseminate one another using turkey basters in order to create a legion of demon babies. Well, that's only part of it. We are also active in community outreach programs."

"The philosophies behind witch and a wiccan are totally different. A wiccan wears ceremonial black robes and invites her body to be inhabited by an evil spirit that commands her to perform tasks of mayhem and destruction. A witch, on the other hand, can wear anything she wants."

"The result is the same whether she confesses or not. If she confesses, her guilt is clear; she is executed. All recantation is in vain. If she does not confess, the torture is repeated—twice, thrice, four times. In exceptional crimes, the torture is not limited in duration, severity, or frequency."

"She can never clear herself. The investigating committee would feel disgraced if it acquitted a woman; once arrested and in chains, she has to be guilty, by fair means or foul."

"When, under the duress of pain, the witch has confessed, her plight is indescribable. Not only cannot she escape herself, but she is also compelled to accuse others whom she does not know, whose names are frequently put into her mouth by the investigators or suggested by the executioner, or of whom she had heard as suspected or accused."

"Witchcraft offers the model of a religion of poetry, not theology. It presents metaphors, not doctrines, and leaves open the possibility of reconciliation of science and religion, of many ways of knowing."

"In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients."

"When have I last looked on The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies Of the dark leopards of the moon? All the wild witches, those most noble ladies, For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone."

"No one shall be found among you who makes a son or daughter pass through fire, who practices divination, or is a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or one that casts spells, or who consults ghosts or spirits, or who seeks oracles from the dead. For whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord."

"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

""But what can I do?" cried she, spreading out her arms helplessly. "I can not hew down trees, as my father used; and in all this end of the king's domain there is nothing else to be done. For there are so many shepherds that no more are needed, and so many tillers of the soil that no more can find employment. Ah, I have tried; hut no one wants a weak girl like me." "Why don't you become a witch?" asked the man. "Me!" gasped Mary-Marie, amazed. "A witch!" "Why not?" he inquired, as if surprised. "Well," said the girl, laughing. "I'm not old enough. Witches, you know, are withered dried-up old hags." "Oh, not at all!" returned the stranger. "And they sell their souls to Satan, in return for a knowledge of witchcraft," continued Mary-Marie more seriously. "Stuff and nonsense!" cried the stranger angrily. "And all the enjoyment they get in life is riding broomsticks through the air on dark nights," declared the girl. "Well, well, well!" said the old man in an astonished tone. "One might think you knew all about witches, to hear you chatter. But your words prove you to be very ignorant of the subject. You may find good people and bad people in the world; and so, I suppose, you may find good witches and bad witches. But I must confess most of the witches I have known were very respectable, indeed, and famous for their kind actions." "Oh. I'd like to be that kind of witch!" said Mary-Marie, clasping her hands earnestly."

"Martha Jones: So. Magic and stuff — it's all a bit Harry Potter … but is it real though — I mean, witches, black magic and and all that — it's real? The Doctor: Of course it isn't! Martha: Well, how am I supposed to know? — I just started believing in time travel; give me a break! The Doctor: It looks like witchcraft, but it isn't — can't be."

"The 10th incarnation of The Doctor: They've still got one foot in the Dark Ages — if I tell them the truth they'll panic and think it was witchcraft. Martha Jones: OK. What was it then? The Doctor [Pauses briefly, stares grimly at her]: Witchcraft."

"He that will not when he may, When he will he shall have nay."

"Better to sink beneath the shock Than moulder piecemeal on the rock!"

"The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice."

"Betwixt the devil and the deep sea."

"Be they wynners or loosers,…beggers should be no choosers."

"He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty."

"Imagine a captain of a ship the moment a shift of direction must be made; then he may be able to say: I can do either this or that. But if he is not a mediocre captain he will also be aware that during all this the ship is ploughing ahead with its ordinary velocity, and thus there is but a single moment when it is inconsequential whether he does this or does that. So also with a person-if he forgets to take into account the velocity-there eventually comes a moment where it is no longer a matter of an Either/Or, not because he has chosen, but because he has refrained from it, which also can be expressed by saying: Because others have chosen for him-or because he has lost himself."

"Every person, if he so wills, can become a paradigmatic human being, not by brushing of his accidental qualities, but by remaining in them and ennobling them. He ennobles them by choosing them."

"So much to win, so much to lose, No marvel that I fear to choose."

"Rather than be less Car'd not to be at all."

"Who would not, finding way, break loose from hell, * * * * * * And boldly venture to whatever place Farthest from pain?"

"When presented with options it's interesting to see what choices the people make."

"We must now take precautions to prevent you from being embarrassed by something in which the ignorant majority is at fault for lack of proper consideration, and so from supposing with them, that man has not been created truly good simply because he is able to do evil. ... If you reconsider this matter carefully and force your mind to apply a more acute understanding to it, it will be revealed to you that man's status is better and higher for the very reason for which it is thought to be inferior: it is on this choice between two ways, on this freedom to choose either alternative, that the glory of the rational mind is based, it is in this that the whole honor of our nature consists, it is from this that its dignity is derived."

"Set honour in one eye and death i' the other, And I will look on both indifferently."

"Which of them shall I take? Both? one? or neither? Neither can be enjoy'd, If both remain alive."

"I will not choose what many men desire, Because I will not jump with common spirits, And rank me with the barbarous multitudes."

"Preferment goes by letter and affection."

"There's small choice in rotten apples."

"[W]e now face a demand to make choices that is unparalleled in human history."

"When conflicted between two choices, take neither."

"Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay."

"It is misleading to say that somebody "chose" a dysfunctional relationship or any other negative situation in his or her life. Choice implies consciousness - a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. This means that you are compelled to think, feel, and act in certain ways according to the conditioning of your mind. That is why Jesus said: "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." This is not related to intelligence in the conventional sense of the word. I have met many highly intelligent and educated people who were also completely unconscious, which is to say completely identified with their mind. In fact, if mental development and increased knowledge are not counterbalanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness, the potential for unhappiness and disaster is very great. p. 142"

"A strange alternative * * * Must women have a doctor or a dance?"

"If I were not Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes."

"Of harmes two the less is for to chose."

"What voice did on my spirit fall, Peschiera, when thy bridge I crost? 'Tis better to have fought and lost Than never to have fought at all!"

"Life often presents us with a choice of evils, rather than of goods."

"Devine, si tu peux, et choisis, si tu l'oses."

"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose."

"Inter sacrum et sazim."

"Se soumettre ou se démettre."

"Where passion leads or prudence points the way."

"But one thing is needful; and Mary hath chosen that good part which shall not be taken away from her."

"For many are called, but few are chosen."

"The difficulty in life is the choice."

"Or fight or fly, This choice is left ye, to resist or die."

"S'asseoir entre deux selles le cul a terre."

"Thy royal will be done—'tis just," Replied the wretch, and kissed the dust; "Since, my last moments to assuage, Your Majesty's humane decree Has deigned to leave the choice to me, I'll die, so please you, of old age."

"When to elect there is but one, 'Tis Hobson's Choice; take that or none."

"Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn."

"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so."

"Ἀλλ' ἐκδιδάσκει πάνθ' ὁ γηράσκων χρόνος."

"Love for the endlessness of labor is in itself an initiation of considerable degree; it prepares you for the conquest of time. Being in a condition where you have conquered time guarantees you a place in the Subtle World, where work is an unavoidable condition, just as it is in the body. A complaint about having to work can only come from a slave of the body."

"It's hard to watch something you love get swallowed, but don't we do the same with our time every day?"

"The sword of time will pierce our skins It doesn't hurt when it begins But as it works its way on in The pain grows stronger watch it grin. Suicide is painless It brings on many changes And I can take or leave them if I please."

"Time makes me stronger Well, there's nothing more to say."

"All things must in equity again decline into that whence they have their origin for they must give satisfaction and atonement for injustice each in the order of time."

"Time is the bridge that always burns behind us."

"Time went on, relentlessly, and one by one the proud works of man were lost."

"Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana."

"Time is not a reality [hupostasis], but a concept [noêma] or a measure [metron]…"

"Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Except are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love."

"That time either has no being at all, or is only scarcely and faintly, one might suspect from this: part of it has happened and is not, while the other part is going to be but is not yet, and it is out of these that the infinite, or any given, time is composed. But it would seem impossible for a thing composed of non-beings to have any share in being."

"Aristotle, Physics, as translated by Joe Sachs (Rutgers University Press: 2011), 217b30"

"Time is not composed of indivisible nows any more than any other magnitude is composed of indivisibles."

"Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted."

"O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time."

"What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not."

"But if any excursive brain rove over the images of forepassed times, and wonder that Thou the God Almighty and All-creating and All-supporting, Maker of heaven and earth, didst for innumerable ages forbear from so great a work, before Thou Wouldest make it; let him awake and consider, that he wonders at false conceits. For whence could innumerable ages pass by, which Thou madest not, Thou the Author and Creator of all ages? or what times should there be, which were not made by Thee? or how should they pass by, if they never were? Seeing then Thou art the Creator of all times, if any time was before Thou madest heaven and earth, why say they that Thou didst forego working? For that very time didst Thou make, nor could times pass by, before Thou madest those times. But if before heaven and earth there was no time, why is it demanded, what Thou then didst? For there was no "then," when there was no time."

"God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change. The secret conversation is thus entirely spiritual; it is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints."

"With regard to authority, it is the greatest weakness to attribute infinite credit to particular authors, and to refuse his own prerogative to time, the author of all authors, and, therefore, of all authority. For truth is rightly named the daughter of time not of authority. It is not wonderful, therefore, if the bonds of antiquity, authority, and unanimity have so enchained the power of man, that he is unable (as if bewitched) to become familiar with things themselves."

"And he that will not apply New Remedies, must expect New Evils: for Time is the greatest Innovateur..."

"The spiritual man is not conscious of time, once he is separated from the physical body. Time is the sequential registration by the brain of states of awareness, and of progressive contacts with phenomena. There is no such thing as time on the inner planes, as humanity understands it. There are only cycles of activity or of non-activity."

"[T]he Quantity of motive Force cannot be known without Time... Time (...abstractedly) is the continuance of any Thing in its own Being. ...Time absolutely... is Quantity, as admitting... Equality, Inequality, and Proportion... [Y]ou may ask, whether Time was not before the World was created? And if Time does not flow in the Extramundane Space, where nothing is: A mere Vacuum? ..[S]ince there was Space before the World was created, and... there now is an Extramundane, infinite Space, (where God is present)... Time existed before the World began... Some Sun might have given Light long before; and at present this, or some other like it, may diffuse Light thro' Imaginary Spaces. Time therefore does not imply an actual Existence, but only the Capacity or Possibility of the Continuance of Existence; just as Space expresses the Capacity of a Magnitude contain'd in it. ...[D]oes not Time imply Motion? I answer no... any more than it does Rest. ...[W]hether Things move on, or stand still; whether we sleep or wake, Time flows perpetually with an equal Tenor."

"Time is... a Quantum in itself, tho' in Order to find the Quantity of it, we... call in Motion... as a Measure... and thus Time as measurable signifies Motion; for if all Things were to continue at Rest, it would be impossible to find out... how much Time has elaps'd... We perceive nothing, unless so far as we may be instigated by some Change affecting the Senses, or that our Souls are mov'd and excited by the internal Operation of the Mind. ...So that the Quantity of Time so far as we can observe; depends upon the Extension of Motion. ...It cannot be justly inferr'd... We do not perceive the Thing, therefore there is no such Thing, that is a false Illusion, a deceitful Dream, that wou'd cause us to join together two remote Instants of Time. But nevertheless this is very True... That is, for as much Motion as there was, so much Time seems to have been elapsed; nor, when we mention such a Quantity of Time, do we merely mean any Thing else, than the Performance of so much Motion, to the continued successive Extension of which we imagine the Permanency as Things is co-extended."

"I cannot exist entirely except when somehow I go beyond the stage of action. Otherwise I’m a soldier, a professional, a man of learning, not a “total human being.” The fragmentary state of humanity is basically the same as the choice of an object. When you limit your desires to possessing political power, for instance, you act and know what you have to do. … You insert your existence advantageously into time. Each of your moments becomes useful. With each moment, the possibility is given you to advance to some chosen goal, and your time becomes a march toward that goal—what’s normally called living. … Every action makes you a fragmentary existence. I hold on to my nature as an entirety only by refusing to act—or at least by denying the superiority of time, which is reserved for action."

"In what time does man live? The thinkers have always known that he does not live in any time at all. The immortality of thoughts and deeds banishes him to a timeless realm at whose heart an inscrutable death lies in wait. ... Devoured by the countless demands of the moment, time slipped away from him; the medium in which the pure melody of his youth would swell was destroyed. The fulfilled tranquility in which his late maturity would ripen was stolen from him. It was purloined by everyday reality, which, with its events, chance occurrences, and obligations, disrupted the myriad opportunities of youthful time, immortal time. ... From day to day, second to second, the self preserves itself, clinging to that instrument: time, the instrument that it was supposed to play."

"Once you realize you deserve a bright future, letting go of your dark past is the best choice you will ever make."

"YEAR, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments."

"Captain James T. Kirk: If change is inevitable, predictable, beneficial, doesn't logic demand that you be a part of it?"

"Mirror Spock: One man cannot summon the future."

"Captain James T. Kirk: But one man can change the present."

"I see the Four-fold Man. The Humanity in deadly sleep, And its fallen Emanation. The Spectre & its cruel Shadow. I see the Past, Present & Future, existing all at once Before me; O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings!"

"Eternity is in love with the productions of time."

"Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time's swiftness Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment."

"Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable. This is what makes it so disturbing to look back upon the time which we have lost. Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. Time lost is time not filled, time left empty."

"Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different."

"Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time."

"The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us."

"Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures."

"And yet, and yet … Negar la sucesión temporal, negar el yo, negar el universo astronómico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos secretos. Nuestro destino no es espantoso por irreal: es espantoso porque es irreversible y de hierro. El tiempo es la sustancia de que estoy hecho. El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo desgraciadamente es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges."

"Legitimate manners owe their value to the fact that they manifest the rarest conditions of acquisition, that is, a social power over time which is tacitly recognized as the supreme excellence: to possess things from the past, i.e., accumulated, crystallized history, aristocratic names and titles, châteaux or ’stately homes’, paintings and collections, vintage wines and antique furniture, is to master time, through all those things whose common feature is that they can only be acquired in the course of time, by means of time, against time, that is, by inheritance or through dispositions which, like the taste for old things, are likewise only acquired with time and applied by those who can take their time."

"we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

"They say time is the fire in which we burn. Right now, Captain, my time is running out. Because we leave so many things unfinished in our lives. And, by the way, I know you will understand."

"Die Zukunft wird nicht gemeistert von denen, die am Vergangenen kleben."

"Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived. After all Number One, we're only mortal."

"Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future."

"Time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's."

"You shouldn't chase after the past or place expectations on the future. What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached. Whatever quality is present you clearly see right there, right there."

"... time is the friend of the wonderful business — it's the enemy of the lousy business."

"If there is one thing that I have come to hate more than the gods, it is time."

"You can never plan the future by the past."

"Yet Time, who changes all, had altered him In soul and aspect as in age; years steal Fire from the mind as vigour from the limb; And life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim."

"When Youth and Pleasure meet To chase the glowing Hours with flying feet."

"O Time! the beautifier of the dead, Adorner of the ruin, comforter And only healer when the heart hath bled— Time! the corrector where our judgments err, The test of truth, love, sole philosopher, For all besides are sophists, from thy thrift Which never loses though it doth defer— Time, the avenger! unto thee I lift My hands, and eyes, and heart, and crave of thee a gift."

"Spared and blessed by Time, Looking tranquility."

"Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, — and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle?"

"The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules."

"Waiting for the time to pass you by; hope the winds of change will change your mind."

"How we remember the past determines the shape of the future."

"'I could tell you my adventures — beginning from this morning,' said Alice a little timidly: 'but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.' 'Explain all that,' said the Mock Turtle. 'No, no! The adventures first,' said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: 'explanations take such a dreadful time.'"

"It's always tea time!"

"Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. There's a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is illumination (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it."

"The Present Time, youngest-born of Eternity, child and heir of all the Past Times with their good and evil, and parent of all the Future, is ever a "New Era" to the thinking man; and comes with new questions and significance, however commonplace it look: to know it, and what it bids us do, is ever the sum of knowledge for all of us. This new Day, sent us out of Heaven, this also has its heavenly omens;—amid the bustling trivialities and loud empty noises, its silent monitions, which if we cannot read and obey, it will not be well with us!"

""The time has come", the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings"."

"Given time-time not in years but in millennia-life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time."

"A butterfly Fluttering over the vendor's Dry flowers of spring Only two days it flies Caught by the lost boy Yet still."

"Time ripens all things. No man is born wise."

"There is a time for some things, and a time for all things; a time for great things, and a time for small things."

"But all in good time."

"With the magnificence of eternity before us, let time, with all its fluctuations, dwindle into its own littleness."

"Time is still one of the great mysteries in physics, one that calls into question the very definition of what physics is."

"Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future."

"The more thorough the understanding needed, the further back in time one must go."

"In the spirit of faith let us begin each day, and we shall be sure to " redeem the time " which it brings to us, by changing it into something definite and eternal. There is a deep meaning in this phrase of the apostle, to redeem time. We redeem time, and do not merely use it. We transform it into eternity by living it aright."

"Time,— that black and narrow isthmus between two eternities."

"The opera ain't over till the fat lady sings."

"Time was the enemy never to be conquered and there were no reserves to help stay the tide."

"Time is the enemy whose patience can’t be exhausted."

"What though the tide of years may roll."

"I am but as others: I am but what I was born to be." "Do you recognize what you were born to be? Not only a nobleman, but a gentleman; not only a gentleman, but a man — man, made in the image of God. How can you, how dare you, give the lie to your Creator?" "What has He given me? What have I to thank Him for?" "First, manhood; the manhood His Son disdained not to wear; worldly gifts, such as rank, riches, influence, things which others have to spend half an existence in earning; life in its best prime, with much of youth yet remaining — with grief endured, wisdom learnt, experience won. Would to Heaven, that by any poor word of mine I could make you feel all that you are — all that you might be!" A gleam, bright as a boy's hope, wild as a boy's daring, flashed from those listless eyes — then faded. "You mean, Mr. Halifax, what I might have been. Now it is too late." "There is no such word as 'too late,' in the wide world — nay, not in the universe. What! shall we, whose atom of time is but a fragment out of an ever-present eternity — shall we, so long as we live, or even at our life's ending, dare to cry out to the Eternal One, 'It is too late!'"

"... on the confines of this world, or from the unknown shores of the next, the question meets them: "What have you done with Time?" —Time, the only mortal gift bestowed equally on every living soul, and, excepting the soul, the only mortal loss which is totally irretrievable."

"The Big Business Man smiled. “Time,” he said, “is what keeps everything from happening at once.""

"I do know what time is,” Tubby declared. He paused. “Time,” he added slowly—“time is what keeps everything from happening at once. I know that—I seen it in print, too.”"

"Time," I said, "Well, I read somewhere that time is what keeps everything from happening at once."

"Truth was the only daughter of Time."

"He is changing times and seasons, removing kings and setting up kings."

"Rose: I can see everything. All that is, all that was, all that ever could be."

"Time is fleeting. See what it brings."

"The whole time of my life may be divided into an infinity of parts, each of which is in no way dependent on any other; and, accordingly, because I was in existence a short time ago, it does not follow that I must now exist, unless in this moment some cause create me anew as it were,—that is, conserve me."

"Time is the simplest thing, and the most precious, for it cannot be made."

"If we consider eternity, into that time never entered; eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period; and eternity had been the same as it is, though time had never been."

"Time Prophet: Time begins and then time ends, and then time begins once again It is happening now, it has happened before, it will surely happen again."

"The line it is drawn The curse it is cast The slow one now Will later be fast As the present now Will later be past The order is rapidly fadin’ And the first one now will later be last For the times they are a-changin’."

"Every reference-body (co-ordinate system) has its own particular time; unless we are told the reference-body to which the statement of time refers, there is no meaning in a statement of the time of an event."

"If you don't take my words too seriously, I would say this: If we assume that all matter would disappear from the world, then, before relativity, one believed that space and time would continue existing in an empty world. But, according to the theory of relativity, if matter and its motion disappeared there would no longer be any space or time."

"In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time."

"Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable."

"Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present."

"Time past and time future Allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, The moment in the draughty church at smokefall Be remembered; involved with past and future. Only through time time is conquered. (II)"

"Time the destroyer is time the preserver, Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops, The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple. And the ragged rock in the restless waters, Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it; On a halcyon day it is merely a monument, In navigable weather it is always a seamark To lay a course by: but in the sombre season Or the sudden fury, is what it always was."

"You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure, That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here."

"Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past Into different lives, or into any future; You are not the same people who left that station Or who will arrive at any terminus, While the narrowing rails slide together behind you."

"Here between the hither and the farther shore While time is withdrawn, consider the future And the past with an equal mind."

"A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments."

"Time is Life."

"Lots of things take time, and time was Momo's only form of wealth."

"All dwelling in one house are strange brothers three, as unlike as any three brothers could be, yet try as you may to tell brother from brother, you'll find that the trio resemble each other. The first isn't there, though he'll come beyond doubt. The second's departed, so he's not about. The third and the smallest is right on the spot, And manage without him the others could not. Yet the third factor with which to be reckoned Because the first brother turns into the second. You cannot stand back and observe number three, For one of the others is all you will see. So tell me, my child, are the three of them one? Or are there but two? Or could there be none? Just name them, and you will at once realize That each rules a kingdom of infinite size. They rule it together and are it as well. In that, they're alike, so where do they dwell?"

"If I had to give you more, it's only been a year Now I've got my foot through the door, and I ain't going nowhere It took a while to get me here, and I'm gonna take my time Don't fight that good shit in your ear, now let me blow ya mind"

"It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world's roaring rim."

"Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."

"Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was — only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow. I like to think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as that keystone is, if it were ever taken away the universe itself would collapse."

"The best general means to insure the profitable employment of our time, is to accustom ourselves to living in continual dependence upon the Spirit of God and His law, receiving, every instant, whatever He is pleased to bestow; consulting Him in every emergency requiring instant action, and having recourse to Him in our weaker moments when virtue seems to fail."

"... the time it would take light (which moves at the fastest known speed) to cross the nucleus of hydrogen (the smallest known object) ... What about still smaller times? Does “time” exist on a still smaller scale? Does it make any sense to speak of smaller times if we cannot measure—or perhaps even think sensibly about—something which happens in a shorter time? Perhaps not. ..."

"Time is money."

"Lost Time is never found again."

"Dost thou love life? then do not squander time; for that is the stuff life is made of."

"Time had passed. It will, given half the chance."

"One luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right."

"It is the future that creates his present. All is an interminable chain of longing."

"“You know what they say about time,” Jacob said idly. “It’s what happens even when nothing else does.”"

"Monday could not have arrived on a worse day. It could have been polite and waited until Tuesday or even Wednesday."

"Seize the time... Live now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again."

"Mr. La Forge, time is one thing we do not have in abundance."

"Jean-Luc Picard: Seize today for we know nothing of tomorrow. Laris: Today is glorious. And none of our tomorrows are guaranteed."

"We often refer to space as the final frontier. But the older I get, the more I come to believe that the true final frontier is time. In command, as in life, what we do in crisis often weighs upon us less heavily than what we wish we had done, what could have been. Time offers many opportunities, but it rarely offers second chances. And as steps forward go I would like to acknowledge your classmate the first fully Romulan cadet at Starfleet Academy: Elnor. May you all go boldly into a future freed from the shackles of the past."

"[T]ime has nothing to show because time won't give me time."

"Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing. Yet the timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness, And knows that 'yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream."

"And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless? But if in you thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons, And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing."

"The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be."

"Goliath: If I didn't fear the damage you would do to the time stream, I'd gladly leave you here. David Xanatos: But you won't, because you didn't. Time travel's funny that way."

"Man hat immer Zeit genug, wenn man sie gut anwenden will."

"In October 1672 ... had sailed to the South American island of ... While there, he noticed that the he had brought... ran ever so slightly slower than it did in Paris. ...When he shortened the three-foot pendulum by just one twelfth of an inch, it corrected the error. ... Isaac Newton, he immediately guessed the cause. The island of Cayenne, situated almost on the Equator, was farther from the center of the Earth's gravitational pull... As the pendulum reached the top of its swing... the gravitational pull would be slightly less... Richer's discovery revealed that the Earth almost certainly bulged at the Equator... one of the first observational confirmations of Newton's theory of gravity. Meanwhile, for Buffon at least, it established that when the world formed, it was molten."

"It's his last book. He wrote in in 1881, the year before he died, and usually we expect that in old age, just before death, that a great scientist will write a pontificating philosophical treatise on the nature of reality. And Darwin... wrote a book on worms. ...He was interested in worms because they were... a metaphor for his larger world-view. The worms that slowly churn the topsoil of England... that work literally beneath our feet, that we never notice, that we think are insignificant because they're so small and lowly, are in fact producing the very soil that is the basis of agriculture. And therefore Darwin uses it as a metaphor for the importance of apparently tiny things when you extend them over long periods of time. And that's what evolution is, the extension of small change (to Darwin) over vast periods of time. So the worms become a metaphor for evolution and for the whole process of temporal change, a very fascinating book."

"Thirty days hath November, April, June, and September, February hath xxviii alone, And all the rest have xxxi."

"The thing about time is, there’s so much of it between so little."

"The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages."

"Time for us embraces a whole field of 'before and after', but Aristotle says: 'Before and after are involved in motion, but time is these so far as they are numbered' (Phys. 223a28). Elsewhere he defines time as 'the number of motion in respect of before and after', and he could seriously discuss the question whether there could be time without conscious and thinking beings; 'for if there could be no one to count, there could be nothing counted. ...If nothing can count but soul, and within soul mind, there cannot be time without soul, but only the substratum of time' (ibid. 219b2, 223a22)"

"We speak of a clock as an instrument for measuring time. In Plato and Aristotle's scheme of things, time (χρόνος) is itself a kind of clock. ...At one point Plato notes ...'men scarcely realize that the journeyings of these planets are time.' ...time is to be actually identified with the planetary motions."

"We may... go to our... statement from Aristotle's treatise on the Pythagoreans, that according to them the universe draws in from the Unlimited time and breath and the void. The cosmic nucleus starts from the unit-seed, which generates mathematically the number-series and physically the distinct forms of matter. ...it feeds on the Unlimited outside and imposes form or limit on it. Physically speaking this Unlimited is [potential or] unformed matter... mathematically it is extension not yet delimited by number or figure. ...As apeiron in the full sense, it was... duration without beginning, end, or internal division—not time, in Plutarch's words, but only the shapeless and unformed raw material of time... As soon... as it had been drawn or breathed in by the unit, or limiting principle, number is imposed on it and at once it is time in the proper sense. ...the Limit, that is the growing cosmos, breathed in... imposed form on sheer extension, and by developing the heavenly bodies to swing in regular, repetitive circular motion... it took in the raw material of time and turned it into time itself."

"Time is always moving on; nothing can stop it. We can’t change the past, but we can shape the future. The more compassionate you are, the more you will find inner peace."

"The difficulties which so many have felt in the doctrine of Negative and Imaginary Quantities in Algebra forced themselves long ago on my attention... And while agreeing with those who had contended that negatives and imaginaries were not properly quantities at all, I still felt dissatisfied with any view which should not give to them, from the outset, a clear interpretation and meaning... It early appeared to me that these ends might be attained by our consenting to regard Algebra as being no mere Art, nor Language, nor primarily a Science of Quantity; but rather as the Science of Order in Progression. It was, however, a part of this conception, that the progression here spoken of was understood to be continuous and unidimensional: extending indefinitely forward and backward, but not in any lateral direction. And although the successive states of such a progression might (no doubt) be represented by points upon a line, yet I thought that their simple successiveness was better conceived by comparing them with moments of time, divested, however, of all reference to cause and effect; so that the "time" here considered might be said to be abstract, ideal, or pure, like that "space" which is the object of geometry. In this manner I was led, many years ago, to regard Algebra as the Science of Pure Time: and an Essay, containing my views respecting it as such, was published in 1835. ...[I]f the letters A and B were employed as dates, to denote any two moments of time, which might or might not be distinct, the case of the coincidence or identity of these two moments, or of equivalence of these two dates, was denoted by the equation,B = Awhich symbolic assertion was thus interpreted as not involving any original reference to quantity, nor as expressing the result of any comparison between two durations as measured. It corresponded to the conception of simultaneity or synchronism; or, in simpler words, it represented the thought of the present in time. Of all possible answers to the general question, "When," the simplest is the answer, "Now:" and it was the attitude of mind, assumed in the making of this answer, which (in the system here described) might be said to be originally symbolized by the equation above written."

"The present moment contains past and future. The secret of transformation, is in the way we handle this very moment."

"The life of this world is made up of three days: yesterday has gone with all that was done; tomorrow, you may never reach; but today is for you so do what you should do today."

"We wish to exhibit history and nature so that we may regard them before scientific elaboration, so that we may see both realities in their reality. This means that we wish to arrive at a horizon from which history and nature can be originally contrasted. This horizon must must itself be a field of constituents against which history and nature stand out in relief. Laying out this field is the task of the "prolegomena to a phenomenology of history and nature." We shall approach this task... by way of a history of the concept of time. ...both historical reality and natural reality are continuities that run their course in time... In natural science, especially in its basic science of physics, the measurement of time plays a fundamental role in defining its objects. The investigation of historical reality is completely incomprehensible without a chronology, an ordination of time. Viewed simply from the outside, history and nature are temporal. To the totality of temporal reality we tend to juxtapose the extratemporal constituents which, for example, are the topic of research in mathematics. In addition... we are familiar with supratemporal constituents in metaphysics or theology, understood as eternity. In a very schematic and crude way, time already announces itself as one 'index' for the differentiation and delimitation of domains of being as such. The concept of time discloses particulars about type and reality for such a demarcation of the universal realm of entities. It becomes, according to the particular stage of its development as a concept, a guide for the question of the being of entities and their potential regions. This occurs without an expressly fundamental consciousness of such a role, which is thus fulfilled in a correspondingly crude way, without bringing to the fore the possibilities which are implied in such an orientation. The concept of time is therefore... linked to the basic question of philosophy, if indeed this asks about the being of entities, the actuality of the actual, the reality of the real."

"The history of the concept of time is the history of the discovery of time and the history of its conceptual interpretation. ...it is the history of the question of the being of entities, the history of the attempts to uncover entities in their being, borne by the particular understanding of time, by the particular level of conceptual elaboration of the phenomenon of time. Hence, in the end, the history of the concept of time is more accurately the history of the decline and the history of the distortion of the basic question of scientific research into the being of entities. It is the history of the incapacity to pose the question of being in a radically new way and to work out its fundamentals anew—an incapacity which is grounded in the being of Dasein."

"Any concepts or words which have been formed in the past through the interplay between the world and ourselves are not really sharply defined with respect to their meaning: that is to say, we do not know exactly how far they will help us in finding our way in the world. We often know that they can be applied to a wide range of inner or outer experience, but we practically never know precisely the limits of their applicability. This is true even of the simplest and most general concepts like "existence" and "space and time". Therefore, it will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth. The concepts may, however, be sharply defined with regard to their connections. This is actually the fact when the concepts become part of a system of axioms and definitions which can be expressed consistently by a mathematical scheme. Such a group of connected concepts may be applicable to a wide field of experience and will help us to find our way... But the limits of the applicability will in general not be known, at least not completely."

"The way in which the convergent mathematical schemes did not fulfill the requirements of relativity and quantum theory was... interesting. ...[O]ne scheme ...interpreted in terms of actual events in space and time, led to a...time reversal... The physicists are convinced... that the processes... do not occur in nature... if... separated by measurable distance in space and time. ...If we assume that the laws of nature do contain a third universal constant... of the order of 10-13 cm, then... our usual concepts... apply only to regions in space and time that are large compared to the universal constant. We should... be prepared for phenomena of a qualitatively new character when we... approach regions... smaller than the nuclear radii. The phenomenon of time reversal... might therefore belong to these smallest regions."

"Time is a game played beautifully by children."

"Whan the sunne shinth make hay, whiche is to say, Take time whan time comth, lest time steale away."

"Old Tune, in whose banks we deposit our notes, Is a miser who always wants guineas for groats; He keeps all his customers still in arrears By lending them minutes and charging them years."

"...dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero."

"Quidquid sub terra est, in apricum proferet ætas; Defodiet condetque nitentia."

": Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will cover up and conceal what is now shining in splendor."

"Observe a method in the distribution of your time. Every hour will then know its proper employment, and no time will be lost"

"The present is the child, and the necessary child, of all the past, and the mother of all the future."

"So much has already been accomplished for the workingman that I have hope, and great hope, of the future. The hours of labor have been shortened, and materially shortened, in many countries. There was a time when men worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. Now, generally, a day’s work is not longer than ten hours, and the tendency is to still further decrease the hours. By comparing long periods of time, we more clearly perceive the advance that has been made. In 1860, the average amount earned by the laboring men, workmen, mechanics, per year, was about two hundred and eighty-five dollars. It is now about five hundred dollars, and a dollar to-day will purchase more of the necessaries of life, more food, clothing and fuel, than it would in 1860. These facts are full of hope for the future."

"The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future."

"Yes, star-crossed in pleasure, the stream flows on by Yes, as we're sated in leisure, we watch it fly, yes And time waits for no one, and it won't wait for me... Time can tear down a building or destroy a woman's face Hours are like diamonds, don't let them waste Time waits for no one, no favors has he"

"Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future."

"A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition. When we say an artist is in a state of transition, many believe that we are belittling. In my opinion when people speak of an art of transition this indicates a better art and the best that art can give. Transition is a complete present which unites the past and the future in a momentary progressive ecstasy, a progressive eternity, a true eternity of eternities, eternal moments. Progressive ecstasy is above all dynamic; movement is what sustains life and true death is nothing but lack of movement, be the corpse upright or supine. Without movement life is annihilated, within and without, for lack of dynamic cohesion. But the dynamism should be principally of the spirit, of the idea, it should be a moral dynamic ecstasy, dynamic in relation to progress, ecstatic in relation to permanence."

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

"At the beginning of the new millennium, and at the close of the Great Jubilee during which we celebrated the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus and a new stage of the Church's journey begins, our hearts ring out with the words of Jesus when one day, after speaking to the crowds from Simon's boat, he invited the Apostle to "put out into the deep" for a catch: "Duc in altum" (Lk 5:4). Peter and his first companions trusted Christ's words, and cast the nets. "When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish" (Lk 5:6). Duc in altum! These words ring out for us today, and they invite us to remember the past with gratitude, to live the present with enthusiasm and to look forward to the future with confidence: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever" (Heb 13:8)."

"[A] feature in the Valentinian account of creation is instructive regarding the much-debated question of the "" of the Gnostics. The world was created after the image of the invisible world of the by a carrying out unwittingly his mother's intention. His ignorance, however, was not complete, as is shown in the following...When the Demiurge further wanted to imitate the timeless nature of the upper Ogdoad (the original eight Aeons in the Pleroma), but could not express their immutable eternity, being as he was a fruit of defect, he embodied their eternity in the times, epochs, and great numbers of years, under the delusion that by the quantity of times he could represent their infinity. Thus truth escaped him and he followed the lie. Therefore his work shall pass away when the times are fulfilled. (Iren. I. 17. 2)This of course is a parady of the famous passage in the Timaeus (37 C ff.) where Plato describes the creation of time as "the moving image of eternity." The vast gulf that divides the spirit of this imitation will be evident to anyone who takes the trouble to compare the two passages."

"Let us transfix this momentary eternity which encloses everything, past and future, but without losing in the immobility of language any of its gigantic erotic whirling."

"Here our interest is directed to the temporal dimension of legality, the way law stands in relation to the past, the present, and the future. Law in the modern era is, we believe, one of the most important of our society’s technologies for preserving memory. Just as the use of precedent to legitimate legal decisions fixes law in a particular relation to the past, memory may be attached, or attach itself, to law and be preserved in and through law. Where this is the case, it serves as one way of orienting ourselves to the future. As Drucilla Cornell puts it: “Legal interpretation demands that we remember the future.” In that phrase, Cornell reminds us that there are, in fact, two audiences for every legal act, the audience of the present and the audience of the future. Law materializes memory in documents, transcripts, written opinions; it reenacts the past, both intentionally and unconsciously, and it is one place where the present speaks to the future through acts of commemoration."

"Because the litigated case creates a record, courts can become archives in which that record serves as the materialization of memory. Due process guarantees an opportunity to be heard by, and an opportunity to speak to, the future. It is the guarantee that legal institutions can be turned into museums of unnecessary, unjust, undeserved pain and death. The legal hearing provides lawyers and litigants an opportunity to write and record history by creating narratives of present injustices, and to insist on memory in the face of denial. By recording such history and constructing such narratives lawyers and litigants call on an imagined future to choose Justice over the “jurispathic” tendencies of the moment."

"Law is one site to both “remember the future” and to insure that the future remembers. Perhaps by paying attention to how law serves memory we can gain new understandings of law’s crucial role in knitting together our past, present and future. Perhaps by attending to the contestation that inevitably accompanies efforts to materialize memory in law we can gain a better understanding of the ways that social conflict plays itself out on the terrain of remembrance."

"Times can blind us to certain truths."

"Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past — let us accept our own responsibility for the future."

"We celebrate the past to awaken the future."

"My call is not to those who believe they belong to the past. My call is to those who believe in the future."

"We must use time as a tool, not as a couch."

"In its [knowledge's] light, we must think and act not only for the moment but for our time. I am reminded of the story of the great French Marshal Lyautey, who once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow-growing and would not reach maturity for a hundred years. The Marshal replied, "In that case, there is no time to lose, plant it this afternoon"."

"But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past are certain to miss the future."

"There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future."

"To say that the future will be different from the present is, to scientists, hopelessly self-evident. I observe regretfully that in politics, however, it can be heresy. It can be denounced as radicalism, or branded as subversion. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed. It hardly seems necessary to point out in California - of all States -- that change, although it involves risks, is the law of life."

"The Bird of Time has but a little way To flutter — and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing"

"Without restlessness time does not really exist: it does not exist for the animal, which is completely devoid of restlessness; and the clock that tells the time cannot do so when the restlessness ceases. But when the restlessness, as in the case of the merely temporal expectancy oscillates between fulfillment and nonfulfillment in such a way that the movement becomes swifter in time because the vanishing of time, the fact that time is passing, accelerates the restlessness, then of course the fulfillment, it if does not come in time, cannot come at all-when this is the case, the expectancy corrodes. Finally the restlessness apparently passes away; alas, this is precisely when the sickness has taken the form of consumption."

"The misfortune of our age is precisely that it has become merely time by itself, temporality, which impatiently wants to hear nothing about eternity and subsequently, well-intentioned or furious, even wants to make the eternal utterly superfluous by means of a contrived imitation, which will never in all eternity succeed, because the more we think we are able to or harden our hearts to be able to dispense with the eternal, all the more do we stand basically in need of just that."

"The power of time is great. In time we may not perceive this, because time slyly steals from one a little at a time; perhaps we will really find this out for the first time in eternity, when we will once more, and in retrospect examine what we with the help of time and the forty hears have managed to pack up. Yes, time is a dangerous power. In time it is so easy to begin over again from the beginning and then forget where one left off. Therefore even when one begins to read a very big book and does not quite trust one’s memory, one puts marks in the book. Ah, but with regard to one’s whole life, how often a person forgets to put in marks in order to be able to take notice properly!"

"Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself—its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again."

"If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are."

"In many indigenous ways of knowing, time is not a river, but a lake in which the past, the present, and the future exist. Creation, then, is an ongoing process and the story is not history alone—it is also prophecy."

"Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right."

"Time: a great engraver, or eraser."

"That is the only true time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people’s time, not his."

"Curious it is that every hour of our day is repeated from myriad chimes; and yet how rarely do we attend to the clock striking ! Alas ! how emblematic is this of the way in which we neglect the many signs of time ! How terrible, when we think of what time may achieve, is the manner in which we waste it! At the end of every man's life, at least three-quarters of the mighty element of which that life was composed will be found void—lost—nay, utterly forgotten ! And yet that time, laboured and husbanded, might have built palaces, gathered wealth, and, still greater, made an imperishable name."

"Time past on as lightly as he always steps over flowers, Brussels carpets, marble terraces, green turfs, or whatever simile may best express a path without an impediment."

"The history of a minute — why, it would give a bird's-eye view of every possible variety in human existence. Wonderful the many events that are happening together — life and death — joy and sorrow— the great and the mean — the common and the rare — good and evil — are all in the record of that brief segment of time."

"Time passed as time ever does when passed monotonously, that is, with a degree of rapidity which only astonishes us when it is recalled to mind by some chance circumstance. Time should he reckoned by events, not hours ; the heart is its truest time-piece, at least as concerns ourselves."

"This hour will pass — all passes, On this life's fleeting scene ; But still the future glasses All that the past has been."

"I do not wish here to discuss the question, intensely interesting though it be, as to whether time can be said really to exist, or whether it is but a limitation of this lower consciousness, and all that we call time — past, present and future alike — is 'but one eternal Now'; I wish only to show that when the ego is freed from physical trammels, either during sleep, trance or death, he appears to employ some transcendental measure of time which has nothing in common with our ordinary physiological one. A hundred stories might be told to prove this fact... It seems that in the Koran there is a wonderful narrative concerning a visit paid one morning by the prophet Mohammed to heaven, during which he saw many different regions there, had them all very fully explained to him, and also had numerous lengthy conferences with various angels; yet when he returned to his body, the bed from which he had risen was still warm, and he found that but a few seconds had passed — in fact, I believe the water had not yet all run out from a jug which he had accidentally overturned as he started on the expedition!"

"Look up here! It appears that the time has finally come for you to start your adventure! You will encounter many hardships ahead... That is your fate. Don't feel discouraged, even during the toughest times!"

"The flow of time is always cruel... its speed seems different for each person, but no one can change it... A thing that does not change with time is a memory of younger days..."

"It is something that grows over time... a true friendship. A feeling in the heart that becomes even stronger through time...The passion of friendship will soon blossom into a righteous power and through it, you'll know which way to go..."

"Time passes, people move...Like a river's flow, it never ends. A childish mind will turn to noble ambition...Young love will become deep affection... The clear water's surface reflects growth..."

"Perhaps the most important way the urban bourgeoisie spread its culture was the revolution it affected in the mental categories of medieval man. The most spectacular of these revolutions, without a doubt, was the one that concerned the concept of and measurement of time."

"As for my own opinion, I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something merely relative, as time is; that I hold it to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions. For space denotes, in terms of possibility, an order of things which exist at the same time, considered as existing together; without inquiring into their particular manner of existing. And when many things are seen together, one perceives that order of things among themselves."

"Suppose someone asks why God did not create everything a year sooner; and that the same person wants to infer from that that God did something for which He cannot possibly have had a reason why He did it thus rather than otherwise, we should reply that his inference would be true if time were something apart from temporal things, for it would be impossible that there should be reasons why things should have been applied to certain instants rather than to others, when their succession remained the same. But this itself proves that instants apart from things are nothing, and that they only consist in the successive order of things; and if this remains the same, the one of the two states (for instance that in which the creation was imagined to have occurred a year earlier) would be nowise different and could not be distinguished from the other which now exists."

"Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?"

"O Time! consumer of all things; O envious age! thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death. Helen, when she looked in her mirror, seeing the withered wrinkles made in her face by old age, wept and wondered why she had twice been carried away."

"Men are in error when they lament the flight of time, accusing it of being too swift, and not perceiving that it is sufficient as it passes; but good memory, with which nature has endowed us, causes things long past to seem present."

"The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present."

"We are deceived by promises and time disappoints us..."

"O time, swift robber of all created things, how many kings, how many nations hast thou undone, and how many changes of states and of various events have happened since the wondrous forms of this fish perished here in this cavernous and winding recess. Now destroyed by time thou liest patiently in this confined space with bones stripped and bare; serving as a support and prop for the superimposed mountain."

"We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us."

"My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no good object can be frustrated by it."

"Life — a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter."

"Time is a valuable thing Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings Watch it count down to the end of the day The clock ticks life away"

"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time."

"There is only one thing in your life YOU can be sure of. That one thing is this moment, now. The last moment has gone forever. The next moment has not come. YOU can become fully conscious only when you are living in the moment. To begin to live in the moment you have to know it exists and understand it. To understand it you have to observe it in relation to yourself and in relation to life. When you understand it, when you become conscious, you will see it is all that exists. To see this is to glimpse reality."

"I heard a million tales before I came to you One after the other said, "Time′s the only cure""

"The more you observe life in relation to yourself the more you will see the fact that you are hardly ever correct when you think about something in the future. The future exists only in imagination; and that is why, no matter how hard you try to imagine it, you will not be able to predict the future with total certainty."

"Time, like a preacher in the days of the Puritans, turned the hour-glass on his high pulpit, the church belfry."

"Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time;"

"Time exists not by itself; but simply from the things which happen, the sense apprehends what has been done in time past, as well as what is present, and what is to follow after."

"The time is always right to do what’s right."

"The modern Father Time, like the classical Saturn, reflected the paradox that time both consumes and brings to fruition. During the sixteenth century, just when Time was being portrayed as the most malevolent of creatures... he was also developing the dualism of a quite different reputation as the father of Truth. Samuel Chew, in The Virtues Reconciled, has shown that from the eleventh century there developed an important allegory in which Truth and Justice, Peace and Mercy were widely represented as the daughters of God. Fritz Saxl, in his essay "Veritas Filia Temporas," had earlier demonstrated that Time too had a paternity to Truth, who, according to Democritus, lay at the bottom of a deep well. Despite the implied sacrilege in the conflicting claims to paternity, Time's claim held good; this was probably because it was so useful an allegory in the conflict between Protestant and Catholic."

"Il tempo si caccia innanzi ogni cosa, e può condurre seco bene come male, male come bene."

"The Romans never allowed a trouble spot to remain simply to avoid going to war over it, because they knew that wars don't just go away, they are only postponed to someone else's advantage. Therefore, they made war with Philip and Antiochus in Greece, in order not to have to fight them in Italy... They never went by that saying which you constantly hear from the wiseacres of our day, that time heals all things. They trusted rather their own character and prudence — knowing perfectly well that time contains the seeds of all things, good as well as bad."

"How awful that silent, unceasing footfall of receding days is when once we begin to watch it! Inexorable, passionless— though hope and fear may pray, " Sun, stand thou still on Gibeon, and thou moon in the valley of Ajalon," — the tramp of the hours goes on. The poets paint them as a linked chorus of rosy forms, garlanded and clasping hands as they dance onwards. So they may be to some of us at some moments. So they may seem as they approach; but those who come hold the hands of those that go, and that troop have no rosy light upon their limbs, their garlands are faded, the sunshine falls not upon the gray and shrouded shapes, as they steal ghost like through the gloom."

"Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit."

"Time is composed of time-atoms, i.e., of many parts, which on account of their short duration, cannot be divided. The Mutakallemim undoubtedly saw how Aristotle proved that time, space, and locomotion are of the same nature. ...They, therefore, knew that if time were continuous and divisible ad infinitum, their assumed atom of space would of necessity likewise be divisible. Similarly, if it were supposed that space were continuous... the time-element... could also be divided. This has been shown by Aristotle in... Acroasis [Aristotelis stagyritae acroases physicae]. ...An hour is, e.g., divided into sixty minutes, the second into sixty parts and so on; at last after ten or more successive divisions by sixty, time-elements are obtained which are not subjected to division, and in fact are indivisible."

"Time plays now on the quietest of flutes."

"Non est, crede mihi, sapientis dicere ‘Vivam’: Sera nimis vita est crastina: vive hodie."

"Look, I know that time is precious, but do you think you could give me a moment or two with Jack?"

"Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of beings and things, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation."

"Who has time? Who has time? But then if we never take time, how can we have time?"

"He that would enjoy life and act with freedom must have the work of the day continually before his eyes. Not yesterday's work, lest he fall into despair; nor to-morrow's, lest he become a visionary—not that which ends with the day, which is a worldly work; nor yet that only which remains to eternity, for by it he cannot shape his actions. Happy is the man who can recognise in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises because the present is given him for a possession. Thus ought Man to be an impersonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite, not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible; nor yet shutting out from his view that which is eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it."

"The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have. The past and future have meaning because they are part of the present: a past event has existence now because you are thinking of it at this present moment, or because it influences you so that you, as a living being in the present, are that much different. The future has reality because one can bring it into his mind in the present. Past was the present at one time, and the future will be the present at some coming moment. To try to live in the "when" of the future or the "then" of the past always involves an artificiality, a separating one's self from reality; for in actuality one exists in the present. The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound."

"I pondered my personal goals, too. My life could have ended that day at the restaurant, but I’d been given more time to be with my children and continue building a legacy. In some ways, we are only what we leave behind... We have only so much time. We need to use it well."

"Time is the alchemy that turns compassion into love."

"We are being sucked into the body of eternity."

"Day and night, Seed-time and harvest, heat and hoary frost Shall hold their course, till fire purge all things new."

"Fly, envious Time, till thou run out thy race: Call on the lazy leaden-stepping Hours, Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace; And glut thyself with what thy womb devours, Which is no more than what is false and vain, And merely mortal dross."

"The Doctor: People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non linear subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey...stuff."

"The Doctor: Ook, sorry, I've got a bit of a complex life. Things don't always happen to me in quite the right order. Gets a bit confusing at times, especially at weddings. I'm rubbish at weddings, especially my own."

"As to Duration, I still think it is absolutely impossible to conceive it without something that exists, and continues to exist, i.e. to endure. But how it should be a property of the thing existing is to me inconceivable. One thing... is absolutely certain, viz. that if eternal Duration be a property of the Supreme Being, Duration limited must be a property of inferior beings; so that we have here some common property. I find you agree with Dr Clarke, in considering Time and Duration as the same. But this is an error that Dr Clarke has fallen into, by not being learned in the Ancient Metaphysics; for there he would have learned that time is only the measure of motion. It therefore could not exist, but with the material world; so that, if we could suppose nothing existing but the Supreme Mind, which is immoveable, there would in that case be Duration, or αίών,—as the Greek Philosophers call it—but not χρόνος, or Time. And the Doctor should not have rejected the common distinction, made by all Philosophers and Divines before him, betwixt Time and Eternity, without assigning better reasons than he has done."

"There are moments in our lives we fear to relive and others we long to repeat. While time cannot give us second chances, maybe people can."

"“I am already late, I fear. What time is it?” “Time? Why the present, of course.”"

"You fail to understand, my friend. We do not control time. If anything, it controls us. We simply measure it."

"Time is at once an agony of the Present, a long torment of the Past and the terrible prospect of countless Futures. Time is also a complex of subtly intersecting realities, of unguessable consequences and undiscoverable causes, of profound tensions and dependencies."

"Doctor Manhattan: There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet."

"He who cannot find time to consult his Bible will one day find he has time to be sick; he who has no time to pray must find time to die; he who can find no time to reflect is most likely to find time to sin; he who cannot find time for repentance will find an eternity in which repentance will be of no avail; he who cannot find time to work for others may find an eternity in which to suffer for himself."

"There was once a time when the life of men resembled that of beasts. They dwelt in mountain caves and dark ravines, for as yet there was no roofed house nor broad city fortified with stone towers. Nor did the curved ploughs cleave the black clod, nurse of the grain, nor the busy iron tend the fruitful rows of bacchic vines, but earth was barren. In mutual slaughter they dined on food of flesh. But when time, begetter and nurturer of all things, wrought a change in mortal life—whether of the solicitude of Prometheus, or from necessity, or by long experience, offering nature itself as teacher—then was discovered holy Demeter's gift, the nourishment of cultivated grain, and the sweet fount of Bacchus. The earth, once barren, began to be ploughed by yoked oxen, towered cities arose, men built sheltering homes and turned their lives from savage ways to civilized. From this time they made it a law to bury the dead or give unburied bodies their portion of dust, leaving no visible reminder of their former impious feasts."

"There is a road that turning always Cuts off the country of Again. Archers stand there on every side And as it runs time's deer is slain And lies where it has lain."

"Was it by reason of the collective Christian desire to provide for the welfare of souls in eternity by regular prayers and devotions that time-keeping and the habits of temporal order took hold of men's minds: habits that capitalist civilization presently turned to good account? One must perhaps accept the irony of this paradox. ...Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing. ...Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human activities."

"The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age."

"The clock... is a piece of power-machinery whose "product" is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science. ...while human life has regularities of its own... time is measured not by the calendar but by the events that occupy it. ...if growth has its own duration and regularities, behind it are not simply matter and motion but the facts of development: in short, history. And while mechanical time is strung out in a succession of mathematically isolated instants, organic time—what Bergson calls duration—is cumulative in its effects. ...organic time moves only in one direction—through the cycle of birth, growth, development, decay, and death—and the past that is already dead remains present in the future that has still to be born."

"One... characteristic of medieval space must be noted: space and time form two relatively independent systems. First: the medieval artist introduced other times within his own spatial world, as when he projected the events of Christ's life within a contemporary Italian city, without the slightest feeling that the passage of time has made a difference, just as in Chaucer the classical legend of Troilus and Cressida is related as if it were a contemporary story. When a medieval chronicler mentions the King... it is sometimes difficult to find out whether he is talking about Caeser or Alexander the Great or his own monarch: each is equally near to him. ...the word anachronism is meaningless when applied to medieval art... in Botticelli's The Three Miracles of St. Zenobius, three different times are presented upon a single stage."

"Because of the separation of time and space, things could appear and disappear suddenly, unaccountably: the dropping of a ship below the horizon no more needed an explanation than the dropping of a demon down the chimney. There was no mystery about the past from which they had emerged, no speculation about the future toward which they were bound: objects swam into vision and sank out of it with something of the same mystery in which the coming and going of adults affect the experience of young children, whose first graphic efforts so much resemble in their organization the world of the medieval artist. In this symbolic world of space and time everything was either a mystery or a miracle."

"Time-saving... became an important part of labor-saving. And as time was accumulated and put by, it was reinvested, like money capital, in new forms of exploitation. From now on filling time and killing time became important considerations: the early paleotechnic employers even stole time from their workers by blowing the factory whistle... earlier in the morning, or moving the hands of the clock... during lunch... Time was a commodity in the sense that money had become a commodity. Time as pure duration, time dedicated to contemplation and reverie, time divorced from mechanical operations, was treated as heinous waste. The paleotechnic world did not heed Wordsworth's Expostulation and Reply: it had no mind to sit on an old gray stone and dream its time away."

"Under capitalism time-keeping is not merely a means of co-ordinating and inter-relating complicated functions: it is also like money an independent commodity with a value of its own."

"Now if the laws of nature hold constant over time—if the rules and patterns of today are the same as those of yesterday and tomorrow—then a valid physical equation will depend only on elapsed time. ...Do we have a universe in which the rules of the game are fixed... or ...a universe in which they vary from moment to moment? ...Nobody knows for sure... On the largest scales, over unimaginably great intervals of space and time, the laws of nature do seem to show a sense of history. ...Newton's mechanical equations specify only differences in time, ascribing no absolute meaning to each instant. The same goes for Maxwell's electromagnetic equations. The same goes for Schrödinger's quantum mechanical equations. The same goes for Einstein's equations of relativity. The same goes for so many other equations that describe so much of the physical universe. For us, open-minded but nonetheless emphasizing this ahistorical aspect of nature, our clocks will tick and tock without any reference to any absolute starting point."

"Don't waste your time, or time will waste you."

"Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat."

"The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future? [...] Nevertheless the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now."

"Hitherto I have laid down the definitions of such words as are less known, and explained the sense in which I would have them to be understood in the following discourse. I do not define time, space, place and motion, as being well known at all. Only I must observe, that the vulgar conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which, it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common. I. Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent and common time is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month or a year."

"I consider time as flowing or increasing by continual flux & other quantities as increasing continually in time & from ye fluxion of time I give the name of fluxions to the velocitys wth wch all other quantities increase. ...I expose time by any quantity flowing uniformly and represent its fluxion by an unit, & the fluxions of other quantities I represent by any other fit symbols... This Method is derived immediately from Nature her self."

"All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle."

"A foot of jade is of no value, an inch of time is to be prized."

"If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future."

"Tempus edax rerum"

"Labitur occulte fallitque volatilis aetas, et nihil est annis velocius."

"Nihil est toto, quod perstet, in orbe. Cuncta fluunt, omnisque vagans formatur imago."

"Sic tempora verti cernimus atque illas adsumere robora gentes, concidere has."

"Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas."

"Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same."

"Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you. He said, when you are pissed off at somebody, and you're angry at them, you just haven't given them enough time. Just give them a little more time — and they'll almost always impress you. And that really stuck with me. I think he's absolutely right on that one."

"Find the best in everybody. … you might have to wait a long time, sometimes years, but people will show you their good side. Just keep waiting no matter how long it takes. No one is all evil. Everybody has a good side, just keep waiting, it will come out."

"Being successful doesn’t make you manage your time well. Managing your time well makes you successful!"

"You don’t find time for important things, you make it."

"Everyone has Good and Bad Times. Find your creative/thinking time. Defend it ruthlessly, spend it alone, maybe at home. Find your dead time. Schedule meetings, phone calls, and mundane stuff during it."

"Turn money into time – especially important for people with kids."

"General Advice: Never break a promise, but re-negotiate them if need be. If you haven’t got time to do it right, you don’t have time to do it wrong. Recognize that most things are pass/fail. Feedback loops: ask in confidence."

"Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won't make us happier."

"Time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think.""

"The key question to keep asking is, Are you spending your time on the right things? Because time is all you have.""

"If I could only give three words of advice, they would be, "tell the truth." If I got three more words, I'd add: "All the time.""

"We don't beat the reaper by living longer, but by living well, and living fully — for the reaper will come for all of us. The question is: what do we do between the time we're born and the time he shows up. Because when he shows up, it’s too late to do all the things that you’re always gonna, kinda get around to."

"Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."

"Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long."

"Time is the wisest counselor of all."

"Be ruled by time, the wisest counsellor of all.'"

"Those spacious regions where our fancies roam, Pain'd by the past, expecting ills to come, In some dread moment, by the fates assign'd, Shall pass away, nor leave a rack behind; And Time's revolving wheels shall lose at last The speed that spins the future and the past: And, sovereign of an undisputed throne, Awful eternity shall reign alone."

"The time will come when every change shall cease, This quick revolving wheel shall rest in peace: No summer then shall glow, not winter freeze; Nothing shall be to come, and nothing past, But an eternal now shall ever last."

"Time began either simultaneously with the world or after it. For since time is a measured space determined by the world's movement, and since movement could not be prior to the object moving, but must of necessity arise either after it or simultaneously with it, it follows of necessity that time also is either coeval with or later born than the world."

"Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say."

"Someone once told me, 'Time is a flat circle.' Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again. And that little boy and that little girl, they're gonna be in that room again and again and again forever."

"In eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So Death created time to grow the things that it would kill and you are reborn but into the same life that you've always been born into. I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can't remember your lives, you can't change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life. You're trapped by that nightmare you keep waking up into."

"So when the universe was quickened with soul, God was well pleased; and he bethought him to make it yet more like its type. And whereas the type is eternal and nought that is created can be eternal, he devised for it a moving image of abiding eternity, which we call time. And he made days and months and years, which are portions of time; and past and future are forms of time, though we wrongly attribute them also to eternity. For of eternal Being we ought not to say 'it was', 'it shall be', but 'it is' alone: and in like manner we are wrong in saying 'it is' of sensible things which become and perish; for these are ever fleeting and changing, having their existence in time."

"And when the father who begat it perceived the created image of the eternal gods, that it had motion and life, he rejoiced and was well pleased; and he bethought him to make it yet more nearly like its pattern. Now whereas that is a living being eternally existent, even so he essayed to make this All the like to the best of his power. Now so it was that the nature of the ideal was eternal. But to bestow this attribute altogether upon a created thing was impossible; so he bethought him to make a moving image of eternity, and while he was ordering the universe he made of eternity that abides in unity an eternal image moving according to number, even that which we have named time. For whereas days and nights and months and years were not before the universe was created, he then devised the generation of them along with the fashioning of the universe. Now all these are portions of time, and was and shall be are forms of time that have come to be, although we wrongly ascribe them unawares to the eternal essence. For we say that it was and is and shall be, but in verity is alone belongs to it: and was and shall be it is meet should be applied only to Becoming which moves in time; for these are motions. But that which is ever changeless without motion must not become elder or younger in time, neither must it have become so in past nor be so in the future; nor has it to do with any attributes that Becoming attaches to the moving objects of sense: these have come into being as forms of time, which is the image of eternity and revolves according to number. Moreover we say that the become is the become, and the becoming is the becoming, and that which shall become is that which shall become, and not-being is not-being. In all this we speak incorrectly. But concerning these things the present were perchance not the right season to inquire particularly."

"Time then has come into being along with the universe, that being generated together, together they may be dissolved, should a dissolution of them ever come to pass; and it was made after the pattern of the eternal nature, that it might be as like to it as was possible. For the pattern is existent for all eternity; but the copy has been and is and shall be throughout all time continually. So then this was the plan and intent of God for the generation of time; the sun and the moon and five other stars which have the name of planets have been created for defining and preserving the numbers of time. ...and a month is fulfilled when the moon, after completing her own orbit, overtakes the sun; a year, when the sun has completed his own course. But the courses of the others men have not taken into account, save a few out of many... they do not know that time arises from the wanderings of these, which are incalculable in multitude and marvellously intricate. None the less however can we observe that the perfect number of time fulfils the perfect year at the moment when the relative swiftnesses of all the eight revolutions accomplish their course together and reach their starting-point, being measured by the circle of the same and uniformly moving. In this way then and for these causes were created all such of the stars as wander through the heavens and turn about therein, in order that this universe may be most like to the perfect and ideal animal by its assimilation to the eternal being."

"May I discard the outer cover of time from the layers of poetry by immersing the poet in its entirety within me."

"I’ve climbed up here holding the hilt of time’s sword after driving it into my tender heart."

"May I not so much be lost as would have no time to look at myself ever."

"Years following years steal something ev'ry day. At last they steal us from ourselves away."

"Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. From a biological point of view it is inconceivable that any culture will forget that it needs to reproduce itself. But it is quite possible for a culture to exist without a social idea of children. Unlike infancy, childhood is a social artifact, not a biological category."

"Hours are golden links, God's token Reaching heaven; but one by one Take them, lest the chain be broken Ere the pilgrimage be done."

"All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality."

"It's weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it's literally the most predictable thing in the Universe."

"Time is at once the most valuable and the most perishable of all our possessions."

"Time, they say, heals every wound; but not, I think, love or hunger."

"(8) In the religion of Zoroaster it is revealed. Except Time, all other things are created. Time is the creator; and Time has no limit, neither top nor bottom. It has always been and shall be for evermore. No sensible person will say whence Time has come. In spite of all the grandeur that surround it, there was no one to call it creator; for it had not brought forth creation. (9) Then it created fire and water; and when it had brought them together, Ohrmazd came into existence, and simultaneously Time became Creator and Lord with regard to the creation it had brought forth. ...(12) Then did Ohrmazd begin . Whatever Ohrmazd did, he did it with the aid of Time; for all the excellence that Ohrmazd needed, had (already) been created."

"We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future. Spinoza, I think, pointed out that we ourselves can make experience valuable when, by imagination and reason, we turn it into foresight."

"What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot procrastinate. The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now."

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."

"To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future."

"Time is... the expression of our ignorance of the full microstate."

"Einstein asked himself a question... how can the sun and the Earth "attract" each other without touching..? ...[H]e imagined that the sun and the Earth each modified the space and time that surrounded them, just as a body in water displaces the water... This modification of the structure of time influences in turn the movement of the bodies, causing them to "fall" toward one another. ...The Earth is a large mass and slows down time in its vicinity. ...If things fall, it is due to this slowing of time. ...Where time passes uniformly, in interplanetary space, things do not fall. ...[H]ere on ...our planet, the movement of things inclines naturally toward where time passes more slowly, as when we run ...into the sea and the resistance of the water on our legs makes us fall headfirst... [T]ime passes more slowly for your feet than it does for your head."

"You talk of the scythe of Time, and the tooth of Time: I tell you, Time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm — we who smite like the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish — ourselves who consume: we are the mildew, and the flame."

"The arguments for the contention that time is unreal and that the world of sense is illusory must, I think, be regarded as fallacious. Nevertheless there is some sense—easier to feel than to state—in which time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential to philosophic thought. The importance of time is rather practical than theoretical, rather in relation to our desires than in relation to truth. A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is. Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom."

"I think that the timelessness of mathematics has none of the sublimity that it once seemed to me to have, but consists merely in the fact that the pure mathematician is not talking about time. ...I think that we can ...mirror the world, like Leibniz's monads; and I think it is the duty of the philosopher to make himself as undistorting a mirror as he can. ...to recognize such distortions ...Of these, the most fundamental is that we view the world from the here and now, not with that large impersonality which theists attribute to the Deity. To achieve such impartiality is impossible for us, but we can travel a certain distance towards it. To show the road to this end is the supreme duty of the philosopher."

"New times demand new measures and new men; The world advances, and in time outgrows The laws which in our father's times were best; And doubtless, after us, some purer scheme Will be shaped out by wiser men than we, Made wiser by the steady growth of truth."

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"When emotion brings us ghosts from the past, only logic can root us in the present."

"The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning."

"Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn."

"Urbes constituit ætas: hora dissolvit: momento fit cinis: diu sylva."

": An age builds up cities: an hour destroys them. In a moment the ashes are made, but a forest is a long time growing."

"Contra primus itaque causas pugnare debemus; causa autem iracundiae opinio iniuriae est, cui non facile credendum est. Ne apertis quidem manifestisque statim accedendum; quaedam enim falsa ueri speciem ferunt. Dandum semper est tempus: ueritatem dies aperit."

"Nemo tam divos habuit faventes, Crastinum ut possit sibi polliceri."

": Nobody has ever found the gods so much his friends that he can promise himself another day."

"Seconds, minutes, hours, they crawl by on hands and knees."

"Time is the nurse and breeder of all good."

"Time's glory is to calm contending kings, To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light."

"Make use of time, let not advantage slip; Beauty within itself should not be wasted: Fair flowers that are not gather'd in their prime Rot and consume themselves in little time."

"Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off, And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. Do not forever with thy vailèd lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust: Thou know'st tis common; all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity."

"The end crowns all, And that old common arbitrator, Time, Will one day end it."

"Let's take the instant by the forward top; For we are old, and on our quick'st decrees The inaudible and noiseless foot of Time Steals ere we can effect them."

"And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye, Says very wisely, "It is ten o'clock: Thus we may see," quoth he, "how the world wags.""

"Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I'll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal."

"Time is the old justice that examines all such offenders, and let Time try."

"There's a time for all things."

"The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite, That ever I was born to set it right!"

"Time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop."

"See the minutes, how they run, How many make the hour full complete; How many hours bring about the day; How many days will finish up the year; How many years a mortal man may live."

"So many hours must I take my rest; So many hours must I contemplate."

"Minutes, hours, days, months, and years, Pass'd over to the end they were created, Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave. Ah, what a life were this!"

"Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides; Who cover faults, at last shame them derides."

"If you can look into the seeds of time, And say which grain will grow and which will not; Speak then to me."

"Come what come may, Time and the hour runs through the roughest day."

"'Gainst the tooth of time And razure of oblivion."

"We should hold day with the Antipodes, If you would walk in absence of the sun."

"Time goes on crutches till love have all his rites."

"Pleasure and action make the hours seem short."

"Time's the king of men, He's both their parent, and he is their grave, And gives them what he will, not what they crave."

"O, call back yesterday, bid time return."

"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; For now hath time made me his numbering clock: My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, Whereto my finger, like a dial's point, Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart, Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans Show minutes, times, and hours."

"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, A great-sized monster of ingratitudes; Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd As fast as they are made, forgot as soon As done."

"Time is like a fashionable host That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand, And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles."

"Beauty, wit, High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service, Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all To envious and calumniating time."

"The whirligig of time brings in his revenges."

"Courage is never born with a person; time and circumstances inject it into a person and bring it forth from within.""

"Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second. Then decide what to do with your time."

"Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we don't know if it even exists..."

"Time, time, time, see what's become of me, While I looked around, For my possibilities; I was so hard to please. But look around, leaves are brown And the sky is a hazy shade of winter."

"Time's tide will smother you … and I will too."

"Time in its slow, illimitable course Brings all to light and buries all again; Strange things it brings to pass, the dreadest oath Is broken and the stubbornest will is bent."

"Do nothing secretly; for Time sees and hears all things, and discloses all."

"Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day."

"Time eases all things."

"I used to think I had the answers to everything But now I know Life doesn't always Go my way, yeah Feels like I'm caught in the middle That's when I realize I'm not a girl Not yet a woman All I need is time A moment that is mine While I'm in between"

"Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded, and all the suns gone dead and cold, there'll still be time. Oh, God, what for?"

"It’s not until they tell you you’re going to die soon that you realize how short life is. Time is the most valuable thing in life because it never comes back."

"I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself, and am I only by being not presupposed but posited, and ... only in the moment when I posit myself."

"Come, sir, is time really so precious? Mine isn't. If yours is, all the more tempting to steal a little."

"The unique aspect of biblical faith is that immediate, mundane history is beheld, affirmed, and lived as the true story of the redemption of time and Creation. Biblical ethics constitute a sacramental participation in history as it happens. ... In this saga, time is transcended within the events of a single day—today—so that all that is past, from the first day, is consummated and is anticipated; so that today is esteemed in its real dignity, as if it were the first day, as if it were the last day, as if it were the only day, as if today and eternity were one."

"While Babylon represents the principality in bondage to death in time—and time is actually a form of that bondage—Jerusalem means the emancipation of human life in a society from the rule of death and breaks through time, transcends time, anticipates within time the abolition of time."

"If a congregation somewhere comes to life as Jerusalem at some hour, that carries no necessary implications for either the past or the future of that congregation. The Jerusalem occurrence is sufficient unto itself. There is—then and there—a transfiguration in which the momentary coincides with the eternal, the innocuous becomes momentous and the great is recognized as trivial, the end of history is revealed as the fulfillment of life here and now, and the whole of creation is beheld as sanctified."

"No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent."

"Time was a flickering gray fire constantly consuming all things, so that what appeared to be motion was actually the oxidation and reduction of possibilities, the collapse of potential matter from grace to nothingness."

"Is it so bad to pause the future to appreciate the past? [...] Is it so bad to shut the door and just accept we can't go back?"

"For the sake of research, the big picture and definitive conclusions, one would have to transcend time, in which everything scurries and whirls."

"Since usurers sell nothing but the hope of money, that is time, they sell the day and the night. But the day is the time of light, and the night is the time of rest; therefore, they sell light and rest. It would not be right, therefore, for them to enjoy eternal light and rest."

"Make use of time, if thou valuest eternity. Yesterday cannot be recalled; to-morrow cannot be assured; to-day only is thine, which, if thou procrastinatest, thou losest, which loss is lost forever."

"Diem adimere aegritudinem hominibus."

"The future has taken root in the present."

"Συνεχές τε … πολυτελὲς ἀνάλωμα εἶναι τὸν χρόνον."

"The Unseasonable man is one who will go up to a busy person, and open his heart to him. He will serenade his mistress when she has a fever. He will address himself to a man who has been cast in a surety-suit, and request him to become his security. He will come to give evidence when the trial is over."

"We all have our time machines, don't we? Those that take us back are memories. Those that carry us forward are dreams."

"Psychological time does not conform to Einstein's physical time. If... my future can be my friend's past, and if my neighbor's past can be my present, then the past cannot be completed and the future is not yet to be made. Past and future must coexist with the present. Like a landscape extending as far as the eye can see, physical time exists in its entirety at once. The canvas of time stretches from the horizon of the past to the horizon of the future. All distinction between past, present and future is but an illusion. ...physical time neither flows nor passes. It exists as a single entity; it simply is."

"This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel, Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down."

"All that we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

"To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the resent moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions. But without a sense of time, how would we function in this world? There would be no goals to strive toward anymore. I wouldn't even know who I am, because my past makes me who I am today. I think time is something very precious, and we need to learn to use it wisely rather than waste it. p. 36"

"Time isn't precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time - past and future - the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is. Why is it the most precious thing? Firstly, because it is the only thing. It's all there is. The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be. Secondly, the Now is the only point that can take you beyond the limited confines of the mind. It is your only point of access into the timeless and formless realm of Being. p. 36"

"The essence of what I am saying here cannot be understood by the mind. The moment you grasp it, there is a shift in consciousness from mind to Being, from time to presence. Suddenly, everything feels alive, radiates energy, emanates Being.... In life-threatening emergency situations, the shift in consciousness from time to presence sometimes happens naturally. The personality that has a past and a future momentarily recedes and is replaced by an intense conscious presence, very still but very alert at the same time. Whatever response is needed then arises out of that state of consciousness... The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now - that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality. p. 37"

"The "second coming" of Christ is a transformation of human consciousness, a shift from time to presence, from thinking to pure consciousness... Ch. 5"

"Time is what the ego lives on. The stronger the ego, the more time takes over your life. Almost every thought you think is then concerned with past or future, and you sense of self depends on the past for your identity and on the future for its fulfillment. Fear, anxiety, expectation, regret, guilt, anger are the dysfunctions of the timebound state of consciousness. p. 123"

"I recently met some old friends, a family I had not seen in a long time, and I was shocked when I saw them. I almost asked, “Are you ill? What happened? Who did this to you?” The mother, who walked with a cane, seemed to have shrunk in size, her face shriveled like an old apple. The daughter , who had been full of energy, enthusiasm, and the expectations of youth when I last saw her, seemed worn out, tired after bringing up three children. Then I remembered: Almost thirty years had passed since we last met. Time had done this to them. p. 125"

"Everything seems to be subject to time, yet it all happens in the Now. That is the paradox. Wherever you look, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence for the reality of time – a rotting apple, your face in the bathroom mirror compared to your face in a photo taken thirty years ago – yet you never find any direct evidence, you never experience time itself. You only ever experience the present moment, or rather what happens in it. If you go by direct evidence only, then there is no time, and the Now is all there ever is. p. 125"

"Time, that is to say, past and future, is what the false mindmade self, the ego, lives on, and time is in your mind. It isn't something that has an objective existence “out there.” It is a mind structure needed for sensory perception, indispensable for practical purposes, but the greatest hindrance to knowing yourself. Time is the horizontal dimension of life, the surface layer of reality. p. 126"

"Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait."

"The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience."

"“They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive. Patience and time are my warriors, my champions,” thought Kutúzov. He knew that an apple should not be plucked while it is green. It will fall of itself when ripe, but if picked unripe the apple is spoiled, the tree is harmed, and your teeth are set on edge."

"You'll never know How I watched you from the shadows as a child You'll never know How it feels to be the one who's left behind You'll never know the days, the nights The tears, the tears I've cried But now my time has come And time, time is not on your side [...] How I watched you from the shadows as a child You'll never know How it feels to get so close And be denied It's a gold and honey trap I've got for you tonight Revenge, it's a kiss, this time I won't miss Now I've got you in my sight With a Golden eye"

"When your legs get weaker time starts running faster."

"You've got to get yourself together You've got stuck in a moment and now you can't get out of it. Don't say that later will be better now, You're stuck in a moment and you can't get out of it. [...] It's just a moment, this time will pass."

"Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus."

"Omnia fert aetas, animum quoque."

"Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit."

"Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis."

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes.""

"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber."

"What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail [...]."

"Time is liquid. One moment is no more important than any other and all moments quickly run away."

"Trust no future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act, act in the living present! Heart within, and God o'erhead!"

"Time has two aspects. For civil and some scientific purposes, we want to know the time of day so that we can order events in sequence. In much scientific work, we want to know how long an event lasts. Thus, any time standard must be able to answer two questions: “When did it happen?” and “What is its duration?”"

"Killing time has never been one of my defter abilities, due, I believe, to my rather keen awareness that it is actually time that kills us."

"Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing."

"If I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence; I become absent minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of time any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should we not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time Dimension; or even to turn about and travel the other way?"

"There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it."

"Over a large part of the civilized world it was believed and taught that the world had been created suddenly in 4004 B.C., though authorities differed as to whether this had occurred in the spring or autumn of that year. ... Such ideas have long since been abandoned by religious teachers, and it is universally recognized that the universe in which we live has to all appearances existed for an enormous period of time and possibly for endless time. Of course there may be deception in these appearances, as a room may be made to seem endless by putting mirrors facing each other at either end."

"Time is not a primary category, and the asymmetry of time between past and future is not a primary category in the description of nature. It is secondary and derived."

"The point is that in the past the time-span of important change was considerably longer than that of a single human life. Thus mankind was trained to adapt itself to fixed conditions. To-day the time-span is considerably shorter than that of human life, and accordingly our training must prepare individuals to face a novelty of conditions."

"... throughout mathematics, in one sense, transition does not enter. The interconnections are displayed in their timeless eternity. It is true that the notions of time, and of approach, and of approximation, occur in mathematical discourse. But as used in the science, the timefulness of time and the motion of approach are abstracted from."

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all."

"It must have required enormous effort for man to overcome his natural tendency to live like the animals in a continual present. Moreover, the development of rational thought actually seems to have impeded man's appreciation for the significance of time. ...Belief that the ultimate reality is timeless is deeply rooted in human thinking, and the origin of rational investigation of the world was the search for permanent factors that lie behind the ever-changing pattern of events."

"Throughout Iranian thought there was a tendency to dualism... two distinct forms or aspects of time were recognized: indivisible time, that is the eternal 'now', and time that is divisible into successive parts. The former represented the creative aspect of time and was fundamental. It was called Zurvan akarana, or infinite time, and was the progenitor of the universe and of the spirits of good and evil. Associated with the universe was the other form of time called Zurvan daregho-chvadhata, that is the time of long dominion, or finite time. This was the time that brought decay and death. It dominated the world of man and was represented by the celestial firmament. ...The whole reason for the existence of finite time appears to have been to bring about that conflict of good and evil which eventually leads to the triumph of the former. ...Finite time begins and ends with the rule of Ohrmazd. At a given moment finite time came into existence out of infinite time. It goes through a cycle of changes until it finally returns to its original state and then merges into infinite time."

"The continuing evolution of our idea of time is revealed by the increasing importance of tense in the development of language. Greater knowledge of the universe has been accompanied by greater appreciation of the distinction between past, present, and future as people have learned to transcend the limitations of 'the eternal present'. Although our awareness of time is based on psychological factors and on physiological processes below the level of consciousness, ...it is also dependent on social and cultural influences. Because of these, there is a reciprocal relation between time and history. For, just as our idea of history is based on that of time, so time as we conceive it is a consequence of our history."

"The idea that time may be an active factor in causation has the mathematical significance that ' t ' (for the system in question) must appear explicitly in the formulation of the law. ...Such law may claim to express the fact of historic, irreversible duration."

"The question of the reversibility of natural processes provides the key to a great intellectual struggle which is now behind the complexities of philosophic and scientific thought. The issue can be formulated thus: Is there a real temporal process in nature? Is the passage of irreversible time a necessary element in any view of the structure of nature? Or, alternatively, is the subjective experience of time a mere illusion of the mind which cannot be given objective expression? These are not metaphysical questions that can still be neglected with impunity. For just as Einstein made his advance by analysing conceptions such as simultaneity, which had been thought to be adequately understood for the purposes of experimental science, so the next development of physical theory will probably be made by carrying on the analysis of time from the point at which Einstein left it."

"Time is a waste of money."

"'Tis in Philosophy, and that is made up of nothing else; but receives addition from every days experiment. True indeed, for Divinity we have an infallible rule that do's plainly inform us of all necessary Truths; and therefore the Primitive Times are of greater Authority, because they were nearer to those holy Men who were the Pen-Men of Scripture. But now for Philosophy, there is no such reason: What ever the School Men may talk; yet Aristotles works are not necessarily true, and he himself hath by sufficient Arguments proved himself to be liable unto errour. Now in this case, if we should speak properly, Antiquity do's consist in the old age of the World, not in the youth of it. In such Learning as may be increased by fresh experiments and new discoveries: 'Tis we are the Fathers, and of more Authority than former Ages; because we have the advantage of more time than they had, and Truth (we say) is the Daughter of Time."

"Time is the inexorable process of doing computation."

"Education is an important element in the struggle for human rights. It is the means to help our children and our people rediscover their identity and thereby increase their self respect. Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs only to the people who prepare for it today."

"Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past."

"The future: a dark, desolate world. A world of war, suffering, loss on both sides. Mutants, and the humans who dared to help them, fighting an enemy we cannot defeat. Are we destined down this path, destined to destroy ourselves like so many species before us? Or can we evolve fast enough to change ourselves... change our fate? Is the future truly set? ... The past: a new and uncertain world. A world of endless possibilities and infinite outcomes. Countless choices define our fate: each choice, each moment, a moment in the ripple of time. Enough ripple, and you change the tide... for the future is never truly set."

"“I can talk about time.” Mr. Rabbit took the watch from his waistcoat pocket again, and regarded its slow, jewelled face curiously. “So fragile, and yet the only unstoppable thing in this or any universe. Time.” He tapped the gently curved glass with his paw. “One second is such a tiny measure in the grand scheme of things. Yet one second can change so much. It is the difference between late and not late, between yesterday and today, and between here and gone.”"

"Nought treads so silent as the foot of Time; Hence we mistake our autumn for our prime."

"The bell strikes one. We take no note of time But from its loss: to give it then a tongue Is wise in man."

"Procrastination is the thief of time: Year after year it steals, till all are fled, And to the mercies of a moment leaves The vast concerns of an eternal scene."

"Time is eternity; Pregnant with all eternity can give; Pregnant with all that makes archangels smile. Who murders Time, he crushes in the birth A power ethereal, only not adorn'd."

"Time wasted is existence, used is life."

"We push time from us, and we wish him back; * * * * * * Life we think long and short; death seek and shun."

"In leaves, more durable than leaves of brass, Writes our whole history."

"We see time's furrows on another's brow, * * * * * How few themselves in that just mirror see!"

"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven."

"Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this."

"For the vision is yet for its appointed time, And it is rushing toward its end, and it will not lie. Even if it should delay, keep in expectation of it! For it will without fail come true. It will not be late!"

"My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle."

"From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

"The signs of the times."

"Brothers and sisters, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; 30 those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; 31 those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away."

"I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the day of salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation."

"A thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night."

"We spend our years as a tale that is told."

"There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven — A time to give birth, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to tear down, and a time to build up. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance. A time to throw stones, and a time to gather stones; A time to embrace, and a time to shun embracing. A time to search, and a time to give up as lost; A time to keep, and a time to throw away. A time to tear apart, and a time to sew together; A time to be silent, and a time to speak. A time to love, and a time to hate; A time for war, and a time for peace."

"Ungodly men by their words and deeds summoned death; considering him a friend, they pined away, and they made a covenant with him, because they are fit to belong to his party. For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves, "Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a man comes to his end, and no one has been known to return from Hades. Because we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been; because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts. When it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes, and the spirit will dissolve like empty air. Our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will remember our works; our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud, and be scattered like mist that is chased by the rays of the sun and is overcome by its heat. For our allotted time is the passing of a shadow, and there is no return from our death, because it is sealed up and no one turns back." Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them."

"It would certainly be a very great mistake to suppose that this Court does not attend to lapse of time."

"This I take notice of, only to shew an uncertainty as to time."

"The time makes no difference in the reason of the thing."

"Examining by hours is not so unprecedented. It was the old custom among the Romans to examine by the hour-glass."

"As for myself, whenever I sit upon the Bench (which is much oftener than I appear at the Bar), I always give the advocates as much water as they require; for I look upon it as the height of presumption to pretend to guess before a cause is heard what time it will require, as to set limits to an affair before one is acquainted with its extent, especially as the first and most sacred duty of a Judge is patience, which, indeed, is itself a very considerable part of justice. But the advocate will say many things that are useless. Granted. Yet is it not better to hear too much than not to hear enough? Besides, how can you know that the things are useless till you have heard them?"

"Six years—six little years—six drops of time."

"Modo, et modo, non habebent modum."

": By-and-by has no end."

"Backward, flow backward, O full tide of years! I am so weary of toil and of tears, Toil without recompense—tears all in vain, Take them and give me my childhood again. I have grown weary of dust and decay, Weary of flinging my heart's wealth away— Weary of sowing for others to reap; Rock me to sleep, mother, rock me to sleep."

"Backward, turn backward, then time in your flight; Make me a child again just for tonight. Mother, come back from the echoeless shore, Take me again to your heart as of yore."

"Why slander we the times? What crimes Have days and years, that we Thus charge them with iniquity? If we would rightly scan, It's not the times are bad, but man."

"Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed."

"Le temps fuit, et nous traîne avec soi: Le moment où je parle est déjà loin de moi."

": Time flies and draws us with it. The moment in which I am speaking is already far from me."

"What's not destroyed by Time's devouring hand?"

"Think not thy time short in this world, since the world itself is not long. The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposition, for a time, between such a state of duration as was before it and may be after it."

"Time was made for slaves."

"Behind, he hears Time's iron gates close faintly, He is now far from them; For he has reached the city of the saintly, The New Jerusalem."

"Some wee short hour ayont the twal."

"Nae man can tether time or tide."

"How slowly time creeps till my Phœbe returns! While amidst the soft zephyr's cool breezes I burn. Methinks if I knew whereabouts he would tread, I could breathe on his wings and 'twould melt down the lead. Fly swifter, ye minutes, bring hither my dear, And rest so much longer for 't when she is here."

"The good old times—all times when old are good— Are gone."

"Thinkst thou existence doth depend on time? It doth; but actions are our epochs; mine Have made my days and nights imperishable, Endless, and all alike."

"Out upon Time! it will leave no more Of the things to come than the things before! Out upon Time! who forever will leave But enough of the past for the future to grieve."

"He more we live, more brief appear Our life's succeeding stages; A day to childhood seems a year, And years like passing ages."

"Time's fatal wings do ever forward fly; To every day we live, a day we die."

"That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb,—for we have no word to speak about it."

"No ay memoria à quien el tiempo no acabe, ni dolor que nuerte no le consuma. There is no remembrance which time does not obliterate, nor pain which death does not put an end to."

"I recommend you to take care of the minutes, for the hours will take care of themselves."

"Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day."

"Opinionum enim commenta delet dies; naturæ judicia confirmat."

": Time destroys the groundless conceits of men; it confirms decisions founded on reality."

"O tempora! O mores!"

": O what times (are these)! what morals!"

"No! no arresting the vast wheel of time, That round and round still turns with onward might, Stern, dragging thousands to the dreaded night Of an unknown hereafter."

"Hours are Time's shafts, and one comes winged with death."

"Sex horas somno, totidem des legibus æquis Quatuor orabis, des epulisque duas; Quod superest ultra sacris largire Camœnis."

": Six hours in sleep, in law's grave study six, Four spend in prayer, the rest on nature fix."

"Time means a lot to me because, you see, I, too, am also a learner and am often lost in the joy of forever developing and simplifying. If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made up of."

"Touch us gently, Time! Let us glide adown thy stream Gently,—as we sometimes glide Through a quiet dream!"

"Begin, be bold, and venture to be wise, He who defers this work from day to day, Does on a river's bank expecting stay, Till the whole stream, which stopped him, should be gone, That runs, and as it runs, for ever will run on."

"Nothing is there to come, and nothing past, But an eternal Now does always last."

"His time's forever, everywhere his place."

"Time, as he passes us, has a dove's wing, Unsoil'd, and swift, and of a silken sound."

"See Time has touched me gently in his race, And left no odious furrows in my face."

"Swift speedy Time, feathered with flying hours, Dissolves the beauty of the fairest brow."

"Che'l perder tempo a chi più sa più spiace."

": The wisest are the most annoyed at the loss of time."

"Old Time, that greatest and longest established spinner of all!… his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his Hands are mutes."

"But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day and the race a life."

"Time, to the nation as to the individual, is nothing absolute; its duration depends on the rate of thought and feeling."

"When Time shall turne those Amber Lockes to Gray."

"Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own; He who, secure within, can say, Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today."

"(Time) with his silent sickle."

"And write whatever Time shall bring to pass With pens of adamant on plates of brass."

"Who well lives, long lives: for this age of ours Should not be numbered by years, daies and hours."

"Let us leave hurry to slaves."

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday."

"Dilatio damnum habet, mora periculum."

": Procrastination brings loss, delay danger."

"The four eights, that ideal of operative felicity, are here (New Zealand) a realized fact."

"I count my time by times that I meet thee; These are my yesterdays, my morrows, noons, And nights, these are my old moons and my new moons. Slow fly the hours, fast the hours flee, If thou art far from or art near to me: If thou art far, the bird's tunes are no tunes; If thou art near, the wintry days are Junes."

"So schaff' ich am sausenden Webstuhl der Zeit."

": Thus at Time's humming loom I ply."

"Ein stiller Geist ist Jahre lang geschäftig; Die Zeit nur macht die feine Gährung kräftig."

": Long is the calm brain active in creation; Time only strengthens the fine fermentation."

"Mein Vermächtniss, wie herrlich weit und breit; Die Zeit ist mein Vermächtniss, mein Acker ist die Zeit."

": My inheritance, how wide and fair Time is my estate; to Time I'm heir."

"Die Zeit ist selbst ein Element."

": Time is itself an element."

"Rich with the spoils of time."

"I made a posy while the day ran by; Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie My life within this band. But time did beckon to the flowers, and they By noon most cunningly did steal away, * And wither'd in my hand."

"Thus times do shift; each thing his turne does hold; New things succeed, as former things grow old."

"Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a flying, And this same flower that smiles to-day, To-morrow will be dying."

"But what says the Greek? "In the morning of life, work; in the midday, give counsel; in the evening, pray.""

"Dum loquimur, fugerit invida Ætas: carpe diem."

": While we are speaking envious time will have fled. Seize the present day."

"Carpe diem, quam minime credula postero."

": Enjoy the present day, trusting very little to the morrow."

"Eheu fugaces Postume, Postume, Labuntur anni, nec pietas moram Rugis et instanti senectæ Afferet, indomitæ que morti."

": Postumus, Postumus, the years glide by us: Alas! no piety delays the wrinkles, Nor the indomitable hand of Death."

"Damnosa quid non imminuit dies?"

": What does not destructive time destroy?"

"Singula de nobis anni prædantur euntes."

": Each passing year robs us of some possession."

"Horæ Memento cita mors venit, aut victoria læta."

": In the hour's short space comes swift death, or joyful victory."

"How short our happy days appear! How long the sorrowful!"

"To the true teacher, time's hour-glass should still run gold-dust."

"And panting Time toil'd after him in vain."

"Seven hours to law, to soothing slumber seven, Ten to the world allot, and all to heaven."

"That old bald cheater, Time."

"The noiseless foot of Tune steals swiftly by And ere we dream of manhood, age is nigh."

"Time, that aged nurse Rocked me to patience."

"Time's waters will not ebb nor stay."

"Memento semper finis, et quia perditum non redit tempus."

": Remember always your end, and that lost time does not return."

"Time, which strengthens Friendship, weakens Love."

"Vingt siècles descendus dans l'éternelle nuit. Y sont sans mouvement, sans lumière et sans bruit."

"Twenty ages sunk in eternal night. They are without movement, without light, and without noise."

"Potius sero quam nunquam."

": Better late than never."

"Time has laid his hand Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it, But as a harper lays his open palm Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations."

"Time is the Life of the Soul."

"Alas! it is not till Time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of human passion with, from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number."

"A handful of red sand from the hot clime Of Arab deserts brought, Within this glass becomes the spy of Time, The minister of Thought."

"What we want, we have for our pains The promise that if we but wait Till the want has burned out of our brains, Every means shall be present to state; While we send for the napkin the soup gets cold, While the bonnet is trimming the face grows old, When we've matched our buttons the pattern is sold, And everything comes too late—too late."

"Volat hora per orbem."

": The hours fly around in a circle."

"Æquo stat fœdare tempus."

": Time stands with impartial law."

"But at my back I always hear Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near."

"Such phantom blossoms palely shining Over the lifeless boughs of Time."

"Time is a feathered thing, And, whilst I praise The sparkling of thy looks, and call them rays, Takes wing, Leaving behind him as he flies An unperceivèd dimness in thine eyes."

"However we pass Time, he passes still, Passing away whatever the pastime, And, whether we use him well or ill, Some day he gives us the slip for the last time."

"Who can undo What time hath done? Who can win back the wind? Reckon lost music from a broken lute? Renew the redness of a last year's rose? Or dig the sunken sunset from the deep?"

"When time is flown, how it fled It is better neither to ask nor tell, Leave the dead moments to bury their dead."

"Time, eftsoon will tumble All of us together like leaves in a gust, Humbled indeed down into the dust."

"Time will run back and fetch the age of gold."

"Le temps … souverain médecin de nos passions."

": Time is the sovereign physician of our passions."

"Time softly there Laughs through the abyss of radiance with the gods."

"A wonderful stream is the river of Time As it runs through the realms of tears, With a faultless rhythm and musical rhyme, And a broader sweep and a surge sublime, And blends with the ocean of years."

"Time, still as he flies, adds increase to her truth, And gives to her mind what he steals from her youth."

"For each age is a dream that is dying, Or one that is coming to birth."

"Labitur occulte, fallitque volubilis ætas, Ut celer admissis labitur amnis aquis."

": Time steals on and escapes us, like the swift river that glides on with rapid stream."

"Dum loquor hora fugit."

": While I am speaking the hour flies."

"Tempore difficiles veniunt ad aratra juvenci; Tempore lenta pati frena docentur equi."

": In time the unmanageable young oxen come to the plough; in time the horses are taught to endure the restraining bit."

"Nec, quæ præteriit, iterum revocabitur unda: Nec, quæ præteriit, hora redire potest."

": Neither will the wave which has passed be called back; nor can the hour which has gone by return."

"Ludit in humanis divina potentia rebus, Et certam præsens vix habet hora fidem."

": Heaven makes sport of human affairs, and the present hour gives no sure promise of the next."

"Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis; Et fugiunt fræno non remorante dies."

": Time glides by, and we grow old with the silent years; and the days flee away with no restraining curb."

"Assiduo labuntur tempora motu, Non secus ad flumen. Neque enim consistere flumen. Nec levis hora potest."

": Time glides by with constant movement, not unlike a stream. For neither can a stream stay its course, nor can the fleeting hour."

"Tempus edax rerum."

": Time that devours all things."

"Temporis ars medicina fere est."

": Time is generally the best medicine."

"These are the times that try men's souls."

"Let time that makes you homely, make you sage."

"Time, the foe of man's dominion, Wheels around in ceaseless flight, Scattering from his hoary pinion Shades of everlasting night."

"The present is our own; but while we speak, We cease from its possession, and resign The stage we tread on, to another race, As vain, and gay, and mortal as ourselves."

"Man yields to death; and man's sublimest works Must yield at length to Time."

"Time is lord of thee: Thy wealth, thy glory, and thy name are his."

"His golden locks Time hath to silver turned, O time too swift! O swiftness never ceasing! His youth 'gainst Time and Age hath ever spurned, But spurned in vain! Youth waneth by increasing."

"Seize time by the forelock."

"Tanto brevius omne, quanto felicius tempus."

": The happier the time, the quicker it passes."

"From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime Out of Space—out of Time."

"Time conquers all, and we must time obey."

"Gone! gone forever!—like a rushing wave Another year has burst upon the shore Of earthly being—and its last low tones, Wandering in broken accents in the air, Are dying to an echo."

"Expect, but fear not, Death: Death cannot kill, Till Time (that first must seal his patent) will. Would'st thou live long? keep Time in high esteem: Whom gone, if thou canst not recall, redeem."

"Dum deliberamus quando incipiendum sit, incipiere jam serum est."

": Whilst we deliberate how to begin a thing, it grows too late to begin it."

"He briskly and cheerfully asked him how a man should kill time."

"E'en such is time! which takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have; And pays us naught but age and dust, Which, in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days. And from which grave, and earth, and dust, The Lord will raise me up, I trust."

"Hour after hour departs, Recklessly flying; The golden time of our hearts Is fast a-dying: O, how soon it will have faded! Joy droops, with forehead shaded; And Memory starts."

"Time, like a flurry of wild rain, Shall drift across the darkened pane!"

"By many a temple half as old as Time."

"To vanish in the chinks that Time has made."

"Que pour les malheureux l'heure lentement fuit!"

": How slowly the hours pass to the unhappy."

"Tag wird es auf die dickste Nacht, und, kommt Die Zeit, so reifen auch die spät'sten Früchte."

": Day follows on the murkiest night, and, when the time comes, the latest fruits will ripen."

"O, wer weiss Was in der Zeiten Hintergrunde schlummert."

": Who knows what may be slumbering in the background of time!"

"Time flies on restless pinions—constant never. Be constant—and thou chainest time forever."

"Spät kommt ihr—doch ihr kommt!"

": You come late, yet you come!"

"Dreifach ist der Schritt der Zeit: Zögernd kommt die Zukunft hergezogen, Pfeilschnell ist das Jetzt entflogen, Ewig still steht die Vergangenheit."

": Threefold the stride of Time, from first to last: Loitering slow, the Future creepeth— Arrow-swift, the Present sweepeth— And motionless forever stands the Past."

"Doch zittre vor der langsamen, Der stillen Macht der Zeit."

": Yet tremble at the slow, silent power of time."

"Upon my lips the breath of song, Within my heart a rhyme, Howe'er time trips or lags along, I keep abreast with time!"

"Time rolls his ceaseless course."

"Infinita est velocitas temporis quæ magis apparet respicientibus. The swiftness of time is infinite, which is still more evident to those who look back upon the past."

"Volat ambiguis Mobilis alis hora."

": The swift hour flies on double wings."

"Nullum ad nocendum tempus angustum est malis."

": No time is too short for the wicked to injure their neighbors."

"Yet, do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young."

"Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth And delves the parallels in beauty's brow."

"O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out Against the wreckful siege of battering days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays? O fearful meditation! where, alack, Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid? Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back? Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?"

"The flood of time is rolling on; We stand upon its brink, whilst they are gone To glide in peace down death's mysterious stream. Have ye done well?"

"Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years, Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears! Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow Claspest the limits of mortality! And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore, Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, Who shall put forth on thee, Unfathomable sea?"

"Per varios præceps casus rota volvitur ævi."

"For time would, with us, 'stead of sand, Put filings of steel in his glass, To dry up the blots of his hand, And spangle life's page as they pass. Since all flesh is grass ere 'tis hay, O may I in clover lie snug, And when old Time mow me away, Be stacked with defunct Lady Mugg!"

"For the next inn he spurs amain, In haste alights, and skuds away, But time and tide for no man stay."

"Time wears all his locks before, Take thou hold upon his forehead; When he flies he turns no more, And behind his scalp is naked. Works adjourn'd have many stays, Long demurs breed new delays."

"Goe to my Love where she is carelesse layd Yet in her winter's bowere not well awake; Tell her the joyous time will not be staid Unlesse she doe him by the forelock take."

"Gather the rose of love whilst yet is time."

"Too late I staid, forgive the crime, Unheeded flew the hours; How noiseless falls the foot of Time That only treads on flow'rs! What eye with clear account remarks The ebbing of his glass, When all its sands are diamond sparks That dazzle as they pass? Ah! who to sober measurement Time's happy swiftness brings, When birds of Paradise have lent Their plumage for his wings?"

"Long ailments wear out pain, and long hopes joy."

"I see that time divided is never long, and that regularity abridges all things."

"In time take time while time doth last, for time Is no time when time is past."

"Nick of Time!"

"Ever eating, never cloying, All-devouring, all-destroying, Never finding full repast, Till I eat the world at last."

"Lauriger Horatius Quam dixisti verum; Fugit euro citius Tempus edax rerum."

"He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend: Eternity mourns that. 'Tis an ill cure For life's worst ills to have no time to feel them."

"Come, Time, and teach me many years, I do not suffer in dream; For now so strange do these things seem, Mine eyes have leisure for their tears."

"Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born."

"I am any man's suitor, If any will be my tutor: Some say this life is pleasant, Some think it speedeth fast, In time there is no present, In eternity no future, In eternity no past. We laugh, we cry, we are born, we die. Who will riddle me the how and the why?"

"Heu! universum triduum!"

"I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds; Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds From the hid battlements of Eternity; Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again."

"Once in Persia reigned a king Who upon his signet ring Graved a maxim true and wise, Which if held before the eyes Gave him counsel at a glance Fit for every change and chance. Solemn words, and these are they: "Even this shall pass away.""

"Time tries the troth in everything."

"The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd, Lets in new light through chinks that Time has made."

"To wind the mighty secrets of the past, And turn the key of time."

"And let its meaning permeate Whatever comes, This too shall pass away."

"He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time."

"Our time is a very shadow that passeth away."

"Delivered from the galling yoke of time."

"Therefore fear not to assay To gather, ye that may, The flower that this day Is fresher than the next."

"In records that defy the tooth of time."

"It's calm under the waves in the blue of my oblivion."

"[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion."

"Oblivion is full of people who allow the opinions of others to overrule their belief in themselves."

"I fear oblivion. I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark."

"There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it."

"Only the dead could afford oblivion."

"No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away."

"Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion."

"I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom."

"Wishing to grab the life with nothingness wanting to erase the sigh of tiredness forgetting myself completely from my being why do I seek embrace of yours do not ask me, I know not, I am in oblivion."

"Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs."

"As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that."

"Then she was kissing him as she had never kissed him before...and it was blissful oblivion, better than firewhisky; she was the only real thing in the world."

"Oblivion - what a blessing...for the mind to dwell a world away from pain."

"Oblivion is not to be hired."

"For those sacred powers Tread on oblivion: no desert of ours Can be entombed in their celestial breasts."

"It is not in the storm nor in the strife We feel benumb'd, and wish to be no more, But in the after-silence on the shore, When all is lost, except a little life."

"Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past."

"And o'er the past oblivion stretch her wing."

"He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more."

"Injuriarum remedium est oblivio."

"What's past and what's to come is strew'd with husks And formless ruin of oblivion."

"Eo magis præfulgebant quod non videbantur."

"But from your mind's chilled sky It needs must drop, and lie with stiffened wings Among your soul's forlornest things; A speck upon your memory, alack! A dead fly in a dusty window-crack."

"This statistical regularity in moral affairs fully establishes their being under the presidency of law. Man is now seen to be an enigma only as an individual; in the mass he is a mathematical problem."

"Probability is the very guide of life."

"It is a truth very certain that, when it is not in our power to determine what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable"

"Al right. I already see you turning off. I can see you say you don't understand me. You can't understand that it could be chance. "I don't like it!" Tough! I don't like it either, but that's the way it is! Ok? I don't understand it either. ..."It must be that Nature knows that it's going to go up or down." No, it must not be that nature knows! We are not to tell Nature what she's gotta be! That's what we found out. Every time we take a guess as how she's got to be, and go and measure... She's clever. She's always got better imagination than we have, and she finds a cleverer way to do it than we have thought of. And in this particular case, the clever way to do it is by probability, by odds. ...[L]ight works by probability."

"My thesis, paradoxically, and a little provocatively, but nonetheless genuinely, is simply this :PROBABILITY DOES NOT EXIST.The abandonment of superstitious beliefs about the existence of Phlogiston, the Cosmic Ether, Absolute Space and Time, ... , or Fairies and Witches, was an essential step along the road to scientific thinking. Probability, too, if regarded as something endowed with some kind of objective existence, is no less a misleading misconception, an illusory attempt to exteriorize or materialize our true probabilistic beliefs."

"Probability is too important to be left to the experts. [...] The experts, by their very expert training and practice, often miss the obvious and distort reality seriously. [...] The desire of the experts to publish and gain credit in the eyes of their peers has distorted the development of probability theory from the needs of the average user. The comparatively late rise of the theory of probability shows how hard it is to grasp, and the many paradoxes show clearly that we, as humans, lack a well grounded intuition in the matter. Neither the intuition of the man in the street, nor the sophisticated results of the experts provides a safe basis for important actions in the world we live in."

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"

"There is no Algebraist nor Mathematician so expert in his science, as to place entire confidence in any truth immediately upon his discovery of it, or regard it as any thing, but a mere probability. Every time he runs over his proofs, his confidence increases; but still more by the approbation of his friends; and is raised to its utmost perfection by the universal assent and applauses of the learned world."

"R. A. Fisher, J. Neyman, R. von Mises, W. Feller, and L. J. Savage denied vehemently that probability theory is an extension of logic, and accused Laplace and Jeffreys of committing metaphysical nonsense for thinking that it is."

"They should have known better. The probability of a train derailment was infinitesimal. That meant it was only a matter of time."

"No human being can give an eternal resolution to another or take it from him; If someone objects that then one might just as well be silent if there is no probability of winning others, he thereby has merely shown that although his life very likely thrived and prospered in probability and everyone of his undertakings in the service of probability went forward, he has never really ventured and consequently has never had or given himself the opportunity to consider that probability is an illusion, but to venture the truth is what gives human life and the human situation pith and meaning, to venture is the fountainhead of inspiration, whereas probability is the sworn enemy of enthusiasm, the mirage whereby the sensate person drags out time and keeps the eternal away, whereby he cheats God, himself, and his generation: cheats God of the honor, himself of liberating annihilation, and his generation of the equality of conditions."

"The epistemological value of probability theory is based on the fact that chance phenomena, considered collectively and on a grand scale, create non-random regularity."

"As is known, the question of the objectivity or the subjectivity of probability has divided the world of science into two camps. Some maintain that there exist two types of probability, as above, others, that only the subjective exists, because regardless of what is supposed to take place, we cannot have full knowledge of it. Therefore, some lay the uncertainty of future events at the door of our knowledge of them, whereas others place it within the realm of the events themselves."

"People seem to flinch at the word probability—it has too many syllables. Besides, it sounds mathematical, and it’s become politically correct in our country to be proud of not knowing any mathematics. (We’re already paying the price for that.)"

"The laws of probability are mighty powerful, and they never sleep. If this were more widely understood there’d be a lot less crowing about good luck, and a lot less guilt about bad luck. And we’d have a more civilized world. Some things really do happen by chance, and there is little we can do to change that."

"Feeling threatened is not the same as being threatened, but the difference gets lost. The danger from low levels of radiation is quite low, as expressed as morbidity statistics or probabilities, but there is an unfortunate lack of connection to probability in the average person. Low probabilities are a particular problem of perception. If they were not, then nobody would play the lottery and the gambling industry would collapse."

"In applying dynamical principles to the motion of immense numbers of atoms, the limitation of our faculties forces us to abandon the attempt to express the exact history of each atom, and to be content with estimating the average condition of a group of atoms large enough to be visible. This method... which I may call the statistical method, and which in the present state of our knowledge is the only available method of studying the properties of real bodies, involves an abandonment of strict dynamical principles, and an adoption of the mathematical methods belonging to the theory of probability. … If the actual history of Science had been different, and if the scientific doctrines most familiar to us had been those which must be expressed in this way, it is possible that we might have considered the existence of a certain kind of contingency a self evident truth, and treated the doctrine of philosophical necessity as a mere sophism."

"Einstein's supreme greatness was in transforming physical thinking from that of the culmination of classical physics about 1900 to that of quantum mechanics starting about 1925. ...far more than anyone else, he caused physicists to think in terms of probabilities. He began to do this in his early work in thermodynamics, and he brought such thinking to its first great fruition in 1905 in his work on Brownian movement and in his first work on radiation, in which he introduced the concept of light quanta or photons. Its second, even greater fruition was in his famous paper on the quantum theory of radiation in 1917. That paper illustrated methods that have been in use almost without change ever since, even though the majority of the users have no knowledge that it was Einstein who propounded them. It was in this paper that Einstein postulated the various transition possibilities between two states of a quantized system. ...quantum theory has existed ever since precisely for the purpose of evaluating these probabilities. In this paper of 1917 Einstein postulated in particular the process known as stimulated emission, and inferred the properties of this process. This is the process employed in the... light maser or laser."

"The theory of probability combines commonsense reasoning with calculation. It domesticates luck, making it subservient to reason."

"Why do [people] confuse probability and expectation, that is, probability and probability times payoff? Mainly because much... schooling comes from examples in symmetric environments... the... bell curve... is entirely symmetric."

"At a purely formal level, one could call probability theory the study of measure spaces with total measure one, but that would be like calling number theory the study of strings of digits which terminate."

"Since the end of World War II, I have been working on the many ramifications of the theory of messages. Besides the electrical engineering theory of the transmission of messages, there is a larger field which includes not only the study of language but the study of messages as a means of controlling machinery and society, the development of computing machines and other such automata, certain reflections upon psychology and the nervous system, and a tentative new theory of scientific method. This larger theory of messages is a probabilistic theory, an intrinsic part of the movement that owes its origin to Willard Gibbs and which I have described in the introduction."

"There’s a stupid rumor. The most ridiculous rumor I think I’ve ever had about me. It’s crazy. To think I would be that vain – I respect mothers and women so much and to be able to experience bringing a child into this world, if you’re lucky and fortunate enough to experience that, I would never, ever take that for granted. It’s the most powerful thing you can do. Especially after losing a child, the pain and trauma from that just makes it mean so much more to get an opportunity to bring life into the world. It seems like people should have boundaries."

"Rumor is rarely more interesting than fact, but it is always more readily available."

"In all cases the best antidote to rumour is the truth, however painful."

"Springfield McKenna didn’t place much faith in rumors. She’d traded in them far too long to lend credence to someone else’s social munitions."

"I'm tired of rumors starting, I'm sick of being followed. I'm tired of people lying, saying what they want about me."

"Rumors flew like bats at dusk."

"I will be gone: That pitiful rumour may report my flight, To consolate thine ear."

"Rumour is a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures, And of so easy and so plain a stop That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still-discordant wavering multitude, Can play upon it."

"Rumour doth double, like the voice and echo, The numbers of the fear'd."

"It ain't that I'm too big to listen to the rumors, it's just that I'm too damned big to pay attention to 'em."

"Vana quoque ad veros accessit fama timores."

"Hi narrata ferunt alio; mensuraque ficti Crescit et auditus aliquid novus adjicit auctor."

"Nam inimici famam non ita ut nata est ferunt."

"The flying rumours gather'd as they roll'd, Scarce any tale was sooner heard than told; And all who told it added something new, And all who heard it made enlargements too."

"I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as 'twas said to me."

"The rolling fictions grow in strength and size, Each author adding to the former lies."

"What some invent the rest enlarge."

"Ad calamitatem quilibet rumor valet."

"Haud semper erret fama; aliquando et elegit."

"There is nothing which cannot be perverted by being told badly."

"Tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which they ought not."

"Extemplo Libyæ magnas it Fama per urbes: Fama malum quo non velocius ullum; Mobilitate viget, viresque acquirit eundo; Parva metu primo; mox sese attollit in auras, Ingrediturque solo, et caput inter nubilia condit. * * * * * * Monstrum, horrendum ingens; cui quot sunt corpore plumæ Tot vigiles oculi subter, mirabile dictu, Tot linguæ, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit aures."

"Fama volat parvam subito vulgata per urbem."

"Linguæ centum sunt, oraque centum Ferrea vox."

"Quoth Sidrophel, If you suppose, Sir Knight, that I am one of those, I might suspect, and take th' alarm, Your bus'ness is but to inform; But if it be, 'tis ne'er the near, You have a wrong sow by the ear."

"Rabid suspicion has nothing in it of skepticism. The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person."

"All seems infected that the infected spy, As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye."

"O you who believe! Avoid many suspicions, for indeed, some suspicions are sinful. And do not spy, nor backbite one another. Would any of you like to eat the flesh of their dead brother? You would despise that! And fear God. Surely, God is the Accepter of Repentance, Most Merciful."

"A person does not incur suspicion unless he has done the thing; and if he has not done it wholly he has done it partly; and if he has not done it partly, he has a mind to do it; and if he has not had a mind to do it, he has seen others doing it and enjoyed"

"All is not well; I doubt some foul play."

"Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; The thief doth fear each bush an officer."

"Would he were fatter! But I fear him not: Yet if my name were liable to fear, I do not know the man I should avoid So soon as that spare Cassius."

"Narrator: The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices...to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill...and suspicion can destroy...and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own -- for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is...that these things cannot be confined...to the Twilight Zone."

"Multorum te etiam oculi et aures non sentientem, sicuti adhuc fecerunt, speculabuntur atque custodient."

"Cautus enim metuit foveam lupus, accipiterque Suspectos laqueos, et opertum milvius hamum."

"Argwohnen folgt auf Misstrauen."

"Que diable alloit-il faire dans cette galère?"

"Julius Cæsar divorced his wife Pompeia, but declared at the trial that he knew nothing of what was alleged against her and Clodius. When asked why, in that case, he had divorced her, he replied: "Because I would have the chastity of my wife clear even of suspicion.""

"As to Cæsar, when he was called upon, he gave no testimony against Clodius, nor did he affirm that he was certain of any injury done to his bed. He only said, "He had divorced Pompeia because the wife of Cæsar ought not only to be clear of such a crime, but of the very suspicion of it.""

"Les soupçons importuns Sont d'un second hymen les fruits les plus communs."

"Ad tristem partem strenua est suspicio."

"Omnes quibus res sunt minus secundæ magis sunt, nescio quomodo, Suspiciosi; ad contumeliam omnia accipiunt magis; Propter suam impotentiam se credunt negligi."

"All we have gained then by our unbelief Is a life of doubt diversified by faith, For one of faith diversified by doubt; We called the chessboard white,— we call it black."

"The fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself."

"Fear, fear, she's the mother of violence"

"Unbelief was easier than belief, much less demanding and subtly flattering because the agnostic felt himself to be intellectually superior to the believer. And then unbelief haunted by faith, as she knew by experience, produced a rather pleasant nostalgia."

"Anti-clericalism and non-belief have their bigots just as orthodoxy does."

"The trouble is I don't believe my unbelief."

"Now let it be written in history and on Mr. Lincoln's tombstone: "He died an unbeliever.""

"Perhaps unbelievers do not so much reject the religious needs and impulses of the human race as adapt to them in realistic and humanistic terms, replacing the fairy tales of conventional religion with the more intellectually demanding tales, provided by modern science, of natural laws and of the demonstrable, replicable evidence of cause-and-effect relationships."

"A world with no place for God is dark, empty without hope."

"In the relics of the saints the Lord Christ has provided us with saving fountains which in many ways pour out benefactions and gush with fragrant ointment. And let no one disbelieve. For, if by the will of God water poured out of the precipitous living rock in the desert, and for the thirsty Sampson from the jawbone of an ass, is it unbelievable that fragrant ointment should flow from the relics of the martyrs? Certainly not, at least for such as know the power of God and the honor which the saints have from Him."

"Alternate translation: Christ gives us the relics of saints as health-giving springs through which flow blessings and healing. This should not be doubted. For if at God’s word water gushed from hard rock in the wilderness-yes, and from an ass’s jawbone when Samson was thirsty -why should it seem incredible that healing medicine should distill from the relics of saints"

"Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe."

"There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave."

"With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another."

"There is no stretch in unbelief. Even the unbelief of what is false is no source of might. It is the truth shining from behind that gives the strength to disbelieve."

"Unbelief is blind."

"How does one kill a God? With unbelief, my logic told me."

"To choose unbelief is to choose mind over dogma, to trust in our humanity instead of all these dangerous divinities."

"I'm from Missouri; you must show me."

"Every wish Is like a prayer—with God."

"If everything proceeded according to their wishes, they would not understand what it means to follow God."

"Genie: Uh, rule number one: I can't kill anybody. (He slices his head off with his finger.) So don't ask. Rule number two (He puts his head back on): I can't make anyone fall in love with anyone else. (His head turns into a giant pair of lips which kiss Aladdin.) You little punim, there. (Lies flat, then gets up and transforms into a green, slimy zombie with a Peter Lorre accent.) Rule number three: I can't bring people back from the dead. It's not a pretty picture, (He grabs Aladdin and shakes him) I don't like doing it! (He poofs back to normal.) Other than that, you got it."

"What you wish to be true is all that matters, regardless of the facts."

"Proud, proud is to hear it all yeah yeah Proud ah proud, proud is to watch us fall yeah yeah Make a wish, make a succotash wish You live the pompous life Throw kisses all the time Make wishes, don't break mine Make a wish, make a succotash wish You live the pompous life Throw kisses all the time Don't break mine, don't break mine Cold fire used to inspire all not now These are tired, maybe they'll find their niche Or resort to wish"

"But there is little gain to be had from wishes, the last attempt at a solution for the weak and the lazy."

"If your heart is in your dream No request is too extreme When you wish upon a star As dreamers do Fate is kind She brings to those who love The sweet fulfillment of their secret longing. Like a bolt out of the blue Fate steps in and sees you through When you wish upon a star Your dreams come true."

"If a man could half his wishes he would double his Troubles."

"Be careful what you wish for, you may receive it."

"If Wishes were Horses, Beggars would ride."

"Anakin Skywalker: Believe me, I wish that I could just wish away my feelings, but I can't."

"Comics speak, without qualm or sophistication, to the innermost ears of the wishful self. The response is like that of a thirsty traveler who suddenly finds water in the desert - he drinks to satiation."

"You pursue, I fly; you fly, I pursue; such is my humor. What you wish, Dondymus, I do not wish, what you do not wish, I do."

"One does not attain everything he wishes for. / Winds blow counter to what the ships desire."

"Henry: There ain't no such thing as magic, is there?"

"Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought: I stay too long by thee, I weary thee."

"Where nothing wants that want itself doth seek."

"Jeannie: Your wish is my command, Master."

"What most we wish, with ease we fancy near."

"Wishing, of all employments is the worst."

"He calls his wish, it comes; he sends it back, And says he called another; that arrives, Meets the same welcome; yet he still calls on; Till one calls him, who varies not his call, But holds him fast, in chains of darkness bound, Till Nature dies, and judgment sets him free; A freedom far less welcome than this chain."

"Man wants but little, nor that little long; How soon must he resign his very dust, Which frugal nature lent him for an hour!"

"What folly can be ranker. Like our shadows, Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines."

""Man wants but little here below Nor wants that little long," 'Tis not with me exactly so; But 'tis so in the song. My wants are many, and, if told, Would muster many a score; And were each wish a mint of gold, I still should long for more."

"O, that I were where I would be, Then would I be where I am not; For where I am I would not be, And where I would be I can not."

"Was man in der Jugend wünscht, hat man im Alter die Fülle."

"Man wants but little here below, Nor wants that little long."

"And the evil wish is most evil to the wisher."

"Little I ask; my wants are few; I only wish a hut of stone (A very plain brown stone will do), That I may call my own; And close at hand is such a one In yonder street that fronts the sun."

"With all thy sober charms possest, Whose wishes never learnt to stray."

"I wish I knew the good of wishing."

"Vous l'avez voulu, vous l'avez voulu, George Dandin, vous l'avez voulu."

"Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious and free, First flower of the earth, and first gem of the sea."

"If I live to grow old, as I find I go down, Let this be my fate in a country town; May I have a warm house, with a stone at my gate, And a cleanly young girl to rub my bald pate. May I govern my passions with an absolute sway, Grow wiser and better as my strength wears away, Without gout or stone, by a gentle decay."

"I've often wished that I had clear, For life, six hundred pounds a year, A handsome house to lodge a friend, A river at my garden's end, A terrace walk, and half a rood Of land, set out to plant a wood."

"Quoniam id fieri quod vis non potest Id velis quod possis."

"On ne peut désirer ce qu'on ne connaît pas."

"Wishers and woulders be small householders."

"The matter lies before the eyes of all; everybody sees it, touches it, loves it, but knows it not. It is glorious and vile, precious and of small account, and is found everywhere... But, to be brief, our Matter has as many names as there are things in this world; that is why the foolish know it not."

"[A]n art without principles, the beginning of which was deceit, the progress delusion, and the end poverty."

"Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy's first law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world's one, and only truth."

"The Hindus do not pay particular attention to alchemy, but no nation is entirely free from it, and one nation has more bias for it than another, which must not be construed as proving intelligence or ignorance; for we find that many intelligent people are entirely given to alchemy, whilst ignorant people ridicule the art and its adepts."

"[E]very relation must be considered as suspicious, which depends in any degree upon religion, ... and ... everything that is to be found in the writers of natural magic or alchemy, or such authors, who seem, all of them, to have an unconquerable appetite for falsehood and fable."

"Alchemy may be compared to the man who told his sons that he had left them gold, buried somewhere in his vineyard; while they by digging found no gold, but by turning up the mould about the roots of the vines procured a plentiful vintage. So the search and endeavours to make gold have brought many useful inventions to light."

"Azoth is the essence of life! We alchemists have the ability to convert it into power! We can live forever! Your Azoth, Fiona, belongs to me! Come to me, Fiona. I will now extract the Azoth latent in you, in order to realize the everlasting life of Aureolus Belli."

"[E]ach author seems to have aimed to write treatises intelligible only to himself, and we greatly doubt his success in even this respect."

"What a lovely afternoon On a cloudbusting kind of day. We took our own 'Mystery Tour' And got completely lost somewhere up in the hills. And we came up on a bee-keeper, And he said "Did you know they can change it all?" They got alchemy. They turn the roses into gold They turn the lilac into honey They're making love for the peaches. And they'll do it, Do it for you."

"And mark yon alchemist, with zodiac-spangled zone, Wrenching the mandrake root that fattens in the gloom."

"[T]he growth of a plant, a tree, or an animal is an alchemical process going on in the alchemical laboratory of nature, and performed by the great Alchemist, the power of God acting in nature."

"Subtle. No egg but differs from a chicken more Than metals in themselves. Surly. That cannot be. The egg's ordained by nature to that end And is a chicken in potentia. Subtle. The same we say of lead and other metals, Which would be gold if they had time. ...for 'twere absurd To think that nature in the earth bred gold Perfect in the instant; something went before. There must be remote matter."

"Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find."

"If by fire Of sooty coal th' empiric alchymist Can turn, or holds it possible to turn, Metals of drossiest ore to perfect gold."

"Alchemy is an erotic science, involved in buried aspects of reality, aimed at purifying and transforming all being and matter."

"They can picture love affairs of chemicals and stars, a romance of stones, or the fertility of fire. Strange, fertile correspondences the alchemists sensed in unlikely orders of being. Between men and planets, plants and gestures, words and weather."

"Although Alchemy has now fallen into contempt, and is even considered a thing of the past, the physician should not be influenced by such judgements. For many arts, such as astronomy, philosophy , and others, are also in disrepute. I am directing you, physicians, to alchemy for the preparation of the magnalia, for the production of the mysteria, for the preparation of the arcana, for the separation of the pure from the impure, to the end that you may obtain a flawless, pure remedy, God-given, perfect, and of certain efficacy, acheiving the highest degree of virtue and power. For it is not God's design that the remedies should exist for us, ready-made, boiled and salted, but that we should boil them ourselves, and it pleases Him that we boil them and learn in the process, that we train ourselves in this art and are not idle on earth, but labour in daily toil. For it is we who must pray for our daily bread, and if He grants it to us, it is only through our labour, our skill and preparation."

"The starving chemist in his golden views Supremely blest."

"Alchemists knew the coiled serpent as Uboros. ...it represented the highest goal of their quest: the harmonious union of opposites, especially the masculine and the feminine sides of the personality. The motto that usually accompanied it was "From the One to the One.""

"You are an alchemist; make gold of that."

"It is necessary to deprive matter of its qualities in order to draw out its soul. ... Copper is like a man; it has a soul and a body; ...the soul is the most subtile part, ... that is to say, the tinctorial spirit. The body is the ponderable, material, terrestrial thing, endowed with a shadow. ... After a series of suitable treatments copper becomes without shadow and better than gold. ...The elements ... grow and are transmuted, because it is their qualities, not their substances, which are contrary."

"Transmutemini (inquit) transmute∣mini de lapidibus mortuis in Lapides vivos philosophicos."

"I had discovered, early in my researches, that their doctrine was no mere chemical fantasy, but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements, and to man himself."

"O, he sits high in all the people's hearts; And that which would appear offence in us, His countenance, like richest alchemy, Will change to virtue and to worthiness."

"To solemnize this day the glorious sun Stays in his course and plays the alchemist, Turning with splendour of his precious eye The meagre cloddy earth to glittering gold."

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"

"He who wishes to learn must believe."

"Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death? No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no. One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?" "Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.""

"Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise."

"There are three kinds of objects of belief. Some are always believed and never understood, such as all history, which runs through temporal and human acts. Others must be understood to be believed, such as all human reasonings. Thirdly, there are those which must be believed first and understood later, like divine matters."

"Do you believe in fairies?...If you believe, clap your hands! Don't let Tinker die."

"Whenever a child says "I don't believe in fairies" there's a little fairy somewhere that falls right down dead."

"Einstein's letters teach us impressively the fact that even an exact science like physics is based on fundamental beliefs."

"And what is meant by believing in Christ but just going with trusting and loving hearts, and committing to His love and power ourselves, our souls, and all that concerns us for time and eternity!"

"Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it … or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings—that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide."

"What motivates most gold purchasers is their belief that the ranks of the fearful will grow. During the past decade that belief has proved correct. Beyond that, the rising price has on its own generated additional buying enthusiasm, attracting purchasers who see the rise as validating an investment thesis. As “bandwagon” investors join any party, they create their own truth – for a while."

"Ideo credendum quod incredibile."

"For fools are stubborn in their way, As coins are harden'd by th' allay; And obstinacy's ne'er so stiff As when 'tis in a wrong belief."

"Scripture points out this difference between believers and unbelievers; the latter, as old slaves of their incurable perversity, cannot endure the rod; but the former, like children of noble birth, profit by repentance and correction."

"No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign and believe there by the grace of God alone!"

"A man with a definite belief always appears bizarre, because he does not change with the world; he has climbed into a fixed star, and the earth whizzes below him like a zoetrope. Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity, because they are hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of the world."

"We should never believe anything we have not dared to doubt."

"To believe everything is weakness, to believe nothing folly."

"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

"If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against mankind."

"Belief, that sacred faculty which prompts the decisions of our will, and knits into harmonious working all the compacted energies of our being, is ours not for ourselves but for humanity. It is rightly used on truths which have been established by long experience and waiting toil, and which have stood in the fierce light of free and fearless questioning. Then it helps to bind men together, and to strengthen and direct their common action. It is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements, for the solace and private pleasure of the believer."

"The fact that believers have found joy and peace in believing gives us the right to say that the doctrine is a comfortable doctrine, and pleasant to the soul; but it does not give us the right to say that it is true. And the question which our conscience is always asking about that which we are tempted to believe is not, "Is it comfortable and pleasant?" but, "Is it true?""

"He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all."

"Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight which gradually transmutes faith into knowledge will be the reward of that belief."

"He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend, must have a very long head, or a very short creed."

"I’ve always believed Frick to be detached from reality, but I thought he was just a megalomaniac, a manipulator, a con artist. Now I begin to slowly understand. He’s far more dangerous than any of those things. He’s a true Believer."

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

"I would rather work with five people who really believe in what they are doing rather than five hundred who can't see the point."

"Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything."

"Dionysus: He who believes needs no explanation. Pentheus: What's the worth in believing worthless things? Dionysus: Much worth, but not worth telling you, it seems."

"He believed because he wanted to believe. And that, too, is madness."

"Abraham Van Helsing: The strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him."

"I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance. That is my religion, and every day I am sorely, grossly, heinously and deeply offended, wounded, mortified and injured by a thousand different blasphemies against it. When the fundamental canons of truth, honesty, compassion and decency are hourly assaulted by fatuous bishops, pompous, illiberal and ignorant priests, politicians and prelates, sanctimonious censors, self-appointed moralists and busy-bodies, what recourse of ancient laws have I? None whatever. Nor would I ask for any. For unlike these blistering imbeciles my belief in my religion is strong and I know that lies will always fail and indecency and intolerance will always perish."

"He does not believe that does not live according to his belief."

"What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it."

"Heaven from the hopeless doubter The true believer makes: Against the darkness outer The light God's likeness takes."

"Where knowledge suffices, we have no need of belief; but where knowledge does not prove its virtue or appears insufficient, we should not dispute the rights of belief."

"I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth."

"I cannot comment on your beliefs. What appears self-evident to one person may seem to another observer to be entirely the product of an idiosyncratic bent."

"The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?" "You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to."

"Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."

"Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe."

"Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe."

"The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life."

"Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world."

"If it were so, as conceited sagacity, proud of not being deceived, thinks, that we should believe nothing that we cannot see with our physical eyes, then we first and foremost ought to give up believing in love. If we were to do so and do it out of fear lest we be deceived, would we not then be deceived? We can, of course, be deceived in many ways. We can be deceived by believing what is untrue, but we certainly are also deceived by not believing what is true. We can be deceived by appearances, but we certainly are also deceived by the sagacious appearance, by the flattering conceit that considers itself absolutely secure against being deceived. Which deception is more dangerous? Whose recovery is more doubtful, that of the one who does not see, or that of the person who sees and yet does not see? What is more difficult—to awaken someone who is sleeping or to awaken someone who, awake, is dreaming that he is awake?"

"Believing something to be true is a complicated affair. It may consist in taking something to be true, pure and simple; or it may consist in believing, but not knowing, something to be true—that is, entertaining doubts about its truth. In the former case the difference between belief and knowledge may not arise. It does in the latter."

"To succeed, we must first believe that we can."

"Faith is not the belief that God will do what you want. It is the belief that God will do what is right."

"I think it’s okay to believe in anything that makes you a better person, whether it’s real or not. You have to believe in something. Me, I choose to believe in nothing, with all my heart, and I am a better person for it."

"What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world, but you knew they'd never believe you?"

"Give to us clear vision that we may know where to stand and what to stand for—because unless we stand for something, we shall fall for anything."

"Belief is a beautiful armor, but makes for the heaviest sword; like punching underwater, you never can hit who you're trying for."

"The long duration of a belief, he thought, is at least proof of an adaption in it to some portion or other of the human mind; and if, on digging down to the root, we do not find, as is generally the case, some truth, we shall find some natural want or requirement of human nature which the doctrine in question is fitted to satisfy: among which wants the instincts of selfishness and of credulity have a place, but by no means an exclusive one."

"A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determine, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy."

"You will not enter Paradise until you believe and you will not believe until you love each other. Shall I show you something that, if you did, you would love each other? Spread peace among yourselves.”"

"Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know."

"We believe, because we love."

"Consciously or unconsciously, the strategy of true believers is to isolate themselves from skeptics."

"Incrédules les plus crédules. Ils croient les miracles de Vespasien, pour ne pas croire ceux de Mose."

"I firmly believe that everyone should be free to pursue their desires as long as it does not harm others or society."

"I believe that the human being is the most complicated chapter of existence, with thousands of dimensions."

"The simple believes everything, But the prudent man carefully considers his ways."

"Seeing is beleeving."

"And be not weak-hearted, nor grieve, and you will have the upper hand if you are believers. If a wound has afflicted you, a wound like it has also afflicted the (disbelieving) people. And We bring these days to men by turns, that Allah may know those who believe and take witnesses from among you. And Allah loves not the wrongdoers, And that He may purge those who believe and deprive the disbelievers of blessings. Do you think that you will enter the Garden while Allah has nor yet known those from among you who strive hard (nor) known the steadfast? And certainly you desired death before you met it. So indeed you have seen it now while you look (at it)."

"Believe as hard as you want to. But convincing yourself however firmly still can’t change the reality of things. Seeing is believing. But seeing isn’t knowing. Believing isn’t knowing. Subjective convictions are meaningless in science, and eyewitness testimony is the least reliable form of evidence."

"Believe it or not"

"If you believe in the sinfulness of the world, for instance, then you will search out from normal sense data those facts that confirm your belief. But beyond that, at other levels you also organize your mental world in such a way that attracts to yourself events that - again - will confirm your beliefs."

"To believe is to be happy; to doubt is to be wretched. To believe is to be strong. Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power. Only so far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do any thing that is worth the doing."

"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good ground for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."

"Man is essentially a dreamer, wakened sometimes for a moment by some peculiarly obtrusive element in the outer world, but lapsing again quickly into the happy somnolence of imagination. Freud has shown how largely our dreams at night are the pictured fulfilment of our wishes; he has, with an equal measure of truth, said the same of day-dreams; and he might have included the day-dreams which we call beliefs."

"Ecosystems majorly shape culture — but then that culture can be exported and persist in radically different places for millennia. Stated most straightforwardly, most of earth’s humans have inherited their beliefs about the nature of birth and death and everything in between and thereafter from preliterate Middle Eastern pastoralists."

"Now God be praised, that to believing souls, Gives light in darkness, comfort in despair!"

"Stands not within the prospect of belief."

"One feels weak only when they believe someone will offer support."

"A thing that nobody believes cannot be proved too often."

"I believe this with all my heart. But not even my sincerest belief, I fear, is sufficient to make it true."

"In religious delusion, eternity and infinity have come within and are under the person’s control. This is unlike the experience with non-psychotic religious beliefs, which are spiritual or metaphorical, usually discussed with others with thoughtful reticence and acknowledgment of our human limitations, and sometimes are held with doubts or at least understanding that others may have doubts."

"For the heart, it needs to believe."

"Take you up when you feeling down When you're sick he will come around Takes his cures from out the ground He's the one who can hypnotize And you'll never believe your eyes He can cause the dead to rise."

"One needs something to believe in, something for which one can have whole-hearted enthusiasm. One needs to feel that one's life has meaning, that one is needed in this world."

"Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause."

"It is very difficult to reason people out of beliefs that they didn’t reason themselves into."

"Only those who doubt really believe, and those who do not doubt are neither tempted against their faith nor do they truly believe."

"We live in a twisted world, where right is wrong and wrong reigns supreme. It is a chilling fact that most of the world's leaders believe in nonsensical fairytales about the nature of reality. They believe in Gods that do not exist, and religions that could not possibly be true. We are driven to war after war, violence on top of violence to appease madmen who believe in gory mythologies. These men are called Christians, Muslims and Jews."

"[[Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else."

"It is no coincidence that so many religious beliefs date back to times when no science could possibly have accounted satisfactorily for many of the natural phenomena inspiring scripture and myths."

"Truth's one reward, belief!"

"For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who do not believe, no explanation is possible."

"I once had an understanding that everything would go my way But now we’ve come too far along for me to hold on to my own beliefs."

"I don't actually have anything against anybody, unless their belief precludes everybody else's. … I am an atheist and an absurdist and I have been for many years. I've actually taken a huge amount of flack for that."

"Someone who is determined to disbelieve something can manage to disregard an Everest of evidence for it."

"I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them."

"Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence."

"There littleness was not; the least of things Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped Her prospects, nor did he believe,—He saw."

"One solace yet remains for us who came Into this world in days when story lacked Severe research, that in our hearts we know How, for exciting youth's heroic flame, Assent is power, belief the soul of fact."

"I am not going to question your opinions. I am not going to meddle with your belief. I am not going to dictate to you mine. All that I say is, examine; enquire. Look into the nature of things. Search out the ground of your opinions, the for and the against. Know why you believe, understand what you believe, and possess a reason for the faith that is in you. ... But your spiritual teachers caution you against enquiry — tell you not to read certain books; not to listen to certain people; to beware of profane learning; to submit your reason, and to receive their doctrines for truths. Such advice renders them suspicious counsellors. By their own creed you hold your reason from their God. Go! ask them why he gave it."

"The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen."

"What ardently we wish, we soon believe."

"Fere libenter homines id, quod volunt, credunt."

"There is no unbelief; Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod And waits to see it push away the clod, He trusts in God."

"Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them."

"Credat Judæus Apella non ego."

"Better trust all and be deceived, And weep that trust, and that deceiving, Than doubt one heart that, if believed, Had blessed one's life with true believing."

"O thou, whose days are yet all spring, Faith, blighted once, is past retrieving; Experience is a dumb, dead thing; The victory's in believing."

"They believed—faith, I'm puzzled—I think I may call Their belief a believing in nothing at all, Or something of that sort; I know they all went For a general union of total dissent."

"Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know."

"Tarde quæ credita lædunt credimus."

"And when religious sects ran mad, He held, in spite of all his learning, That if a man's belief is bad, It will not be improved by burning."

"Do not believe what I tell you here any more than if it were some tale of a tub."

"I have believed the best of every man, And find that to believe it is enough To make a bad man show him at his best, Or even a good man swing his lantern higher."

"Begin by regarding every thing from a moral point of view, and you will end by believing in God."

"The man who goes through life with an uncertain doctrine not knowing what he believes, what a poor, powerless creature he is! He goes around through the world as a man goes down through the street with a poor, wounded arm, forever dodging people he meets on the street for fear they may touch him."

"If that impression does not remain on this intrepid and powerful people, into whose veins all nations pour their mingling blood, it will be our immense calamity. Public action, without it, will lose the dignity of consecration. Eloquence, without it, will miss what is loftiest, will give place to a careless and pulseless disquisition, or fall to the flatness of political slang. Life, without it, will lose its sacred and mystic charm. Society, without it, will fail of inspirations, and be drowned in an animalism whose rising tides will keep pace with its wealth."

"My death and life, My bane and antidote, are both before me."

"“Destiny,” said John. “The ghastliest word a man can speak.”"

"Destiny, prosperity -- the wood of destiny, wood of prosperity, and the reeds of destiny, reeds of prosperity, adorn the holy cattle-pen."

"Lifting your head in your goodness, greatness and majesty, majestically you extend your arm in order to determine destinies."

"God does reprobate some. For it was said above (A[1]) that predestination is a part of providence. To providence, however, it belongs to permit certain defects in those things which are subject to providence, as was said above (Q[22], A[2]). Thus, as men are ordained to eternal life through the providence of God, it likewise is part of that providence to permit some to fall away from that end; this is called reprobation. Thus, as predestination is a part of providence, in regard to those ordained to eternal salvation, so reprobation is a part of providence in regard to those who turn aside from that end. Hence reprobation implies not only foreknowledge, but also something more, as does providence, as was said above (Q[22], A[1]). Therefore, as predestination includes the will to confer grace and glory; so also reprobation includes the will to permit a person to fall into sin, and to impose the punishment of damnation on account of that sin."

"Che l'uomo il suo destin fugge di raro."

"[God] promised not from the power of our will but from His own predestination. For He promised what He Himself would do, not what men would do. Because, although men do those good things which pertain to God’s worship, He Himself makes them to do what He has commanded; it is not they that cause Him to do what He has promised. Otherwise the fulfilment of God’s promises would not be in the power of God, but in that of men."

"Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny."

"We believe that all the posterity of Adam, being thus fallen into perdition and ruin by the sin of our first parents, God then did manifest himself such as he is; that is to say, merciful and just: Merciful, since he delivers and preserves from this perdition all whom he, in his eternal and unchangeable council, of mere goodness hath elected in Christ Jesus our Lord, without respect to their works: Just, in leaving others in the fall and perdition wherein they have involved themselves."

"There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learnt to separate them. Desire, the strongest thing in the world, is itself all future, and it is not for nothing that in all the religions the motive is always forwards to an endless futurity of bliss or annihilation. Now that religion gives place to science the paradisical future of the soul fades before the Utopian future of the species, and still the future rules. But always there is, on the other side, destiny, that which inevitably will happen, a future here concerned not as the other was with man and his desires, but blindly and inexorably with the whole universe of space and time. The Buddhist seeks to escape from the Wheel of Life and Death, the Christian passes through them in the faith of another world to come, the modern reformer, as unrealistic but less imaginative, demands his chosen future in this world of men. Can we in any better way reconcile desire and fate?"

"DESTINY, n. A tyrant's authority for crime and fool's excuse for failure."

"Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved."

"There are certain events which to each man's life are as comets to the earth, seemingly strange and erratic portents; distinct from the ordinary lights which guide our course and mark our seasons, yet true to their own laws, potent in their own influences."

"For I am a weed, Flung from the rock, on Ocean's foam, to sail, Where'er the surge may sweep, the tempest's breath prevail."

"All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God."

"I believe that we are given choices, places where decisions may be made to walk one road or another. We do not know what provides these choices, but we may call it destiny to give a name to that which is unknowable. Destiny offers the choices, but we choose the road."

"We create our own destiny by the way we do things. We have to take advantage of opportunities and be responsible for our choices."

"The trick in chasing destiny is to feel it as a rider, a rider on a spinning ball waiting for a rare chance in time. Those few moments of balance between darkness and light where the infinite is in motion and the motion is felt as a dance, as a solution that dissolves the question."

"[Ivan:] "Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth." "No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly."

"No people are truly free until they can determine their own destiny."

"Nature—pitiless in a pitiless universe—is certainly not concerned with the survival of Americans or, for that matter, of any of the two billion people now inhabiting this earth. Hence, our destiny, with the aid of God, remains in our own hands."

"Our destiny is frequently met in the very paths we take to avoid it."

"Nothing is more seductive than a sense of destiny."

"Sometimes a man can still meet his destiny on the road he took to avoid it."

"Weddyng is desteny, And hangyng likewise."

"Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miner and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. "We condition them to thrive on heat," concluded Mr. Foster. "Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it.""

"If the heavens turn against me, I can do nothing."

"Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature... But it is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma. Understanding the law of karma is known as the light of the world because through this understanding we can take responsibility for our destinies and be truly more guided to greater fulfillment in our lives."

"'Tis strange how the heart can create Or colour from itself its fate; We make ourselves our own distress, We are ourselves our happiness."

"Living in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies."

"We can't run from who we are. Our destiny chooses us."

"Destiny is the bridge you build to the one you love."

"We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us."

"We are what we must And not what we would be. I know that one hour Assures not another. The will and the power Are diverse."

"Destiny has a funny way When it comes and takes all your cares away I can't think of a single thing Other than what a beautiful state I'm in"

"We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified."

"Don't you know that what happens to you once always happens again? You always react in the same way to the same thing. It's no accident when you make a mess. Then you do it again. It's called destiny."

"When one has made a mistake, one says. "Another time I shall know what to do," when one should say is: "I already know what I shall really do another time.""

"Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace."

"A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself."

"The problem is not the harshness of Fate, for anything we want strongly enough we get. The trouble is rather that when we have it we grow sick of it, and then we should never blame Fate, only our own desire."

"When we heard what they [Simmias and Cebes] said we were all depressed, as we told each other afterwards. We had been quite convinced by the previous argument [Socrates' argument], and they seemed to confuse us again, and to drive us to doubt not only what had already been said but also what was going to be said, lest we be worthless as critics or the subject itself [the fate of the soul] admitted of no certainty."

"when a girl is wedded, her fate is fixedwhen a child is born, his stars are fixedlife is fixed, love is fixed, death is fixed"

"The problem with Destiny, of course, is that she is often not careful where she puts her finger."

"I think the destiny of all men is not to sit in the rubble of their own making but to reach out for an ultimate perfection which is to be had. At the moment, it is a dream. But as of the moment we clasp hands with our neighbor, we build the first span to bridge the gap between the young and the old. At this hour, it’s a wish. But we have it within our power to make it a reality. If you want to prove that God is not dead, first prove that man is alive."

"What a falling-off was there!"

"A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm."

"Imperious Cæsar, dead and turn'd to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away: O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe, Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!"

"Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew and dog will have his day."

"We shall be winnow'd with so rough a wind That even our corn shall seem as light as chaff, And good from bad find no partition."

"Here burns my candle out; ay, here it dies, Which, whiles it lasted, gave King Henry light."

"Think you I bear the shears of destiny? Have I commandment on the pulse of life?"

"For it is a knell That summons thee to heaven or to hell."

"What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?"

"Things at the worst will cease or else climb upward To what they were before."

"If he had been as you and you as he, You would have slipt like him."

"A man whom both the waters and the wind, In that vast tennis-court, hath made the ball For them to play upon."

"They that stand high have many blasts to shake them; And if they fall, they dash themselves to pieces."

"What is done cannot be now amended."

"But He, that hath the steerage of my course, Direct my sail!"

"And all the bustle of departure—sometimes sad, sometimes intoxicating—just as fear or hope may be inspired by the new chances of coming destiny."

"And from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land."

"Quisque suos patimur manes."

"God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin; nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established. By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death. As God hath appointed the elect unto glory, so hath He, by the eternal and most free purpose of His will, foreordained all the means thereunto. Wherefore, they who are elected . . . are effectually called unto faith in Christ by His Spirit working in due season, are justified, adopted, sanctified, and kept by His power. through faith, unto salvation. Neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but the elect only. The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of His own will, whereby He extendeth or withholdeth mercy, as He pleaseth, for the glory of His Sovereign power over His creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice. (Chap. III — Articles I, III, VI and VII)"

"We talk about destiny, about what's meant to be, when in reality it's usually a combination of failure plus time, a series of adjusted circumstances, a question of human resilience and ability to reconfigure our expectations."

"Life treads on life, and heart on heart; We press too close in church and mart To keep a dream or grave apart."

"Art and power will go on as they have done,—will make day out of night, time out of space, and space out of time."

"Character is fate. (Destiny)."

"No living man can send me to the shades Before my time; no man of woman born, Coward or brave, can shun his destiny."

"All, soon or late, are doom'd that path to tread."

"The future works out great men's destinies: The present is enough for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever."

"We are but as the instrument of Heaven. Our work is not design, but destiny."

"Unseen hands delay The coming of what oft seems close in ken, And, contrary, the moment, when we say "'Twill never come!" comes on us even then."

"They only fall, that strive to move, Or lose, that care to keep."

"The irrevocable Hand That opes the year's fair gate, doth ope and shut The portals of our earthly destinies; We walk through blindfold, and the noiseless doors Close after us, forever."

"Every man meets his Waterloo at last."

"Ich fühl 's das ich der Mann des Schicksals bin."

"Truly some men there be That live always in great horrour, And say it goeth by destiny To hang or wed: both hath one hour; And whether it be, I am well sure, Hanging is better of the twain; Sooner done, and shorter pain."

"The seed ye sow, another reaps; The wealth ye find, another keeps; The robes ye weave, another wears; The arms ye forge, another bears."

"Thou cam'st not to thy place by accident, It is the very place God meant for thee; And should'st thou there small room for action see, Do not for this give room for discontent."

"Tes destins sont d'un homme, et tes vœux sont d'un dieu."

"Pluck one thread, and the web ye mar; Break but one Of a thousand keys, and the paining jar Through all will run."

"One country, one constitution, one destiny."

"To be a Prodigal's favourite,—then worse truth, A Miser's Pensioner,—behold our lot!"

"Another error is an impatience of doubt, and haste to assertion without due and mature suspension of judgment. For the two ways of contemplation are not unlike the two ways of action commonly spoken of by the ancients: the one plain and smooth in the beginning, and in the end impassable; the other rough and troublesome in the entrance, but after a while fair and even. So it is in contemplation: if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."

"Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt there truth is—'tis her shadow."

"All doubt is cowardice — all trust is brave."

"Doubt is natural to a human being, for his conceptions are infinite, his powers are only finite."

"Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by Action alone."

"We should never believe anything we have not dared to doubt."

"If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against mankind."

"Inquiry into the evidence of a doctrine is not to be made once for all, and then taken as finally settled. It is never lawful to stifle a doubt; for either it can be honestly answered by means of the inquiry already made, or else it proves that the inquiry was not complete."

"He would not, with a peremptory tone, Assert the nose upon his face his own."

"I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms on awaking; I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning."

"The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom."

"Another meme of the religious meme complex is called faith. It means blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence. The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence. Nothing is more lethal for certain kinds of meme than a tendency to look for evidence. The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held up to us as worthy of imitation. The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry."

"Several years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation..."

"Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything."

"Incredulity doesn't kill curiosity; it encourages it."

"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. ... it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. ... I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here ... I might think about it a little bit ... but I don't have to know an answer, I don't feel frightened about not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me."

"Doubt grows with knowledge."

"Is God fair? The Christians say that God damns forever anyone who is skeptical about truth of bunkistic religion as revealed unto the holy haranguers. What this means is that a God, if any, punishes a man for using his reason. If there is a God in existence, reasons should be available for his existence. Assuming that such a precious thing as a man's eternal future depends on his belief in a God, then the materials for that belief should be overwhelming and not at all doubtful. Yet here is a man whose reason makes it impossible for him to believe in a God. He sees no evidence of such an entity. He finds all the arguments weak and worthless. He doubts and he denies. Then is a God fair in visiting upon such a skeptic the penalty for his inevitable intellectual attitude? The intelligent man refuses to believe fairy tales. Can a God blame him? If so, then a God is not as fair as an ordinarily decent man. And fairness, we think, is more important than piety."

"To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man."

"To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death."

"Fear believes — courage doubts. Fear falls upon the earth and prays — courage stands erect and thinks. Fear is barbarism — courage is civilization. Fear believes in witchcraft, in devils and in ghosts. Fear is religion — courage is science."

"I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous — if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men."

"I may be wrong, and often am, but I never doubt."

"Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe."

"Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will."

"I do think it strange that people have doubted everything and have again reached certainty, without as much as dropping a word concerning the difficulties which have held my thought captive—so much so that I have, now and then, longed to be freed of them—freed by the aid of one, note well, who was aware of these difficulties, and not of one who in his sleep had a notion to doubt, and to have doubted, everything, and again in his sleep had the notion that he is explaining, and has explained, all."

"What is clear to one man may be doubtful to another."

"There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking."

"Doubt is useful, it keeps faith a living thing. After all, you cannot know the strength of your faith until it has been tested."

"She had learned to doubt, rather than simply to question."

"And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye."

"To know much is often the cause of doubting more."

"I should always like to follow in the path of Goethe when he said: "If you must tell me your opinions, tell me what you believe in. I have plenty of doubts of my own"."

"The doubtful beam long nods from side to side."

"Believe it or not"

"We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt."

"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

"William James used to preach the "will-to-believe." For my part, I should wish to preach the "will-to-doubt." None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite."

"The Vammika Sutta likens skeptical doubt to a fork in the road. Say a traveler who is carrying many valuables arrives at a fork in the road; if he lingers there unable to decide which way to take, robbers may catch and possibly kill him. In the same way, a doubtful meditator who falls prey to wavering and procrastination cannot continue on with practice. He or she will then become a victim of mental defilements and be unable to escape the cycle of suffering. Only when he or she abandons doubt by noting it and uninterruptedly continues the practice can he or she be liberated from the cycle of suffering."

"But yet, madam— I do not like, "but yet," it does allay The good precedence; fie upon "but yet!" "But yet" is a gaoler to bring forth Some monstrous malefactor."

"To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?"

"But now I am cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd, bound in To saucy doubts and fears."

"Our doubts are traitors And make us lose the good we oft might win By fearing to attempt."

"To be once in doubt Is once to be resolv'd."

"No hinge nor loop, To hang a doubt on."

"Modest doubt is call'd The beacon of the wise."

"Out of doubt comes faith."

"There lives more faith in honest doubt,Believe me, than in half the creeds."

"Doubt, indeed, is the disease of this inquisitive, restless age. It is the price we pay for our advanced intelligence and civilization. It is the dim night of our resplendent day. But as the most beautiful light is born of darkness, so the faith which springs from conflict is often the strongest and the best."

"Only those who doubt really believe, and those who do not doubt are neither tempted against their faith nor do they truly believe."

"Those who do not doubt do not believe. Faith is maintained by resolving doubts, and again resolving those further doubts which are suggested by the resolution of previous doubts."

"La doute n'est pas un état bien agréable, mais l'assurance est un état ridicule."

"Doubt is for the dying."

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."

"Non men che saver, dubbiar m'aggrata."

"Uncertain ways unsafest are, And doubt a greater mischief than despair."

"Vous ne prouvez que trop que chercher à connaître N'est souvent qu' apprendre à douter."

"Doubt indulged soon becomes doubt realized."

"When in doubt, win the trick."

"He who dallies is a dastard, He who doubts is damned."

"But the gods are dead— Ay, Zeus is dead, and all the gods but Doubt, And doubt is brother devil to Despair!"

"Fain would I but dare not; I dare, and yet I may not; I may, although I care not for pleasure when I play not."

"And he that doubteth is damned if he eat."

"To believe with certainty we must begin with doubting."

"I follow my law and fulfil it all duly—and look! when your doubt runneth high— North points to the needle!"

"Doubt comes in at the window when inquiry is denied at the door."

"You ask bitterly, like Pontius Pilate, "What is truth?" In such an hour what remains? I reply, "Obedience." Leave those thoughts for the present. Act — be merciful and gentle — honest; force yourself to abound in little services; try to do good to others; be true in the duty that you know. That must be right, whatever else is uncertain. And by all the laws of the human heart, by the word of God, you shall not be left to doubt. Do that much of the will of God which is plain to you, and "You shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God.""

"To get rid of your doubts, part with your sin. Put away your intemperance, your dishonesty, your unlawful ways of making money, your sensuality, your falsehood, acted or spoken, and see if a holy life be not the best disperser of unwelcome doubts, and new obedience the most certain guide to fresh assurance."

"Fear not to confront realities. The Saviour lives; and the first joy that you will give to Him is when, leaving off your false excuses, you throw yourself with a full heart and empty hands into His arms of mercy. The Saviour lives; and were you now to die looking for salvation only from that Friend of Sinners, verily this day should you be with Him in a better than Adam's paradise. The Saviour lives; and in full sympathy with that wondrous lover of men's souls, the Holy Spirit is even now ready if besought to begin His sanctifying process in your mind. The Saviour lives; and even now He stretches out toward you an arm which, if you only grasp in thankful love, your faith shall strengthen while you cling, and it will be from no weakness in that arm, if you are not erelong exalted to a point of holy attainment which at this moment you view with despair, and by and by to that region of unveiled realities where you will ask in wonder at yourself, "Wherefore did I doubt?""

"Cold hearts are not anxious enough to doubt. Men who love will have their misgivings at times; that is not the evil. But the evil is, when men go on in that languid, doubting way, content to doubt, proud of their doubts, morbidly glad to talk about them, liking the romantic gloom of twilight, without the manliness to say, "I must and will know the truth." That did not John the Baptist. Brethren, John appealed to Christ."

"People, when asked if they are Christians, give some of the strangest answers you ever heard. Some will say if you ask them: "Well — well — well, I, — I hope I am." Suppose a man should ask me if I am an American. Would I say: "Well, I — well, I — I hope I am?""

""I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing." "Oh," says man, "but the Babel fish is a dead give-away, isn't it? It proves You exist, and so therefore You don't." "Oh, I hadn't thought of that," says God, who promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. "Ah, that was easy," says man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white, and gets killed on the next zebra crossing. Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys."

"In order to provide you, my dearest son Reginald, with a summary of the whole Christian life, to be kept ever before your eyes, our entire aim in this work will be to discuss these three virtues: first of all faith, then hope, and finally charity. This is, in fact, the order followed by the Apostle, and it is also what sound reason demands."

"I have faith; not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new ones; faith in human nature; faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest. Let us be true to our time, Mrs. Lee!"

"Even theologians — even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, — even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself — did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God."

"I would fain ask one of these bigotted Infidels, supposing all the great Points of Atheism … were laid together and formed into a kind of Creed, according to the Opinions of the most celebrated Atheists; I say, supposing such a Creed as this were formed, and imposed upon any one People in the World, whether it would not require an infinitely greater Measure of Faith, than any Set of Articles which they so violently oppose."

"No doctrine can be a proper object of our faith which it is not more reasonable to believe than to reject. […] In receiving therefore the most mysterious doctrines of revelation, the ultimate appeal is to reason: not to determine whether she could have discovered these truths; not to declare whether considered in themselves they appear probable; but to decide whether it is not more reasonable to believe what God speaks, than to confide in our own crude and feeble conceptions."

"The power of any faith comes not from its coercion of critics and dissenters. It comes from the moral integrity and the intellectual strength of its believers."

"Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer. And let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good."

"Ἔστιν δὲ πίστις ἐλπιζοµένων ὑπόστασις, πραγµάτων ἔλεγχος οὐ βλεποµένων. Ἐν ταύτῃ γὰρ ἐµαρτυρήθησαν οἱ πρεσβύτεροι. Πίστει νοοῦµεν κατηρτίσθαι τοὺς αἰῶνας ῥήµατι Θεοῦ, εἰς τὸ µὴ ἐκ ϕαινοµένων τὰ βλεπόµενα γεγονέναι."

"God hath endowed us with different faculties, suitable and proportional to the different objects that engage them. We discover sensible things by our senses, rational things by our reason, things intellectual by understanding; but divine and celestial things he has reserved for the exercise of our faith, which is a kind of divine and superior sense in the soul. Our reason and understanding may at some times snatch a glimpse, but cannot take a steady and adequate prospect of things so far above their reach and sphere. Thus, by the help of natural reason, I may know there is a God, the first cause and original of all things; but his essence, attributes, and will, are hid within the veil of inaccessible light, and cannot be discerned by us but through faith in his divine revelation. He that walks without this light, walks in darkness, though he may strike out some faint and glimmering sparkles of his own. And he that, out of the gross and wooden dictates of his natural reason, carves out a religion to himself, is but a more refined idolater than those who worship stocks and stones, hammering an idol out of his fancy, and adoring the works of his own imagination. For this reason God is nowhere said to be jealous, but upon the account of his worship."

"The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world."

"Blind faith in any institution does not make one honorable."

"Est autem fides credere quod nondum vides; cujus fidei merces est videre quod credis."

"Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that thou mayest believe, but believe that thou mayest understand."

"Mahomet made the people believe that he would call a hill to him, and from the top of it offer up his prayers for the observers of his law. The people assembled; Mahomet called the hill to come to him, again and again, and when the hill stood still, he was never a whit abashed, but said, if the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill."

"The essence of faith is fewness of words and abundance of deeds; he whose words exceed his deeds, know verily his death is better than his life."

"Faith is a higher faculty than reason."

"There is one inevitable criterion of judgment touching religious faith in doctrinal matters. Can you reduce it to practice? If not, have none of it."

"“She is armed with the power of the spirit. The power of faith.” Dravid had resisted the urge to yawn. He had heard this kind of “empty-hand, spirit-power” mania too many times to even give it credence by mocking it. He had also seen any number of similarly deluded cults and spiritual blind-faithers walk like fools into the trajectory of safe-care weapons, only to have their very real physical bodies torn to shreds by unspiritual projectiles and explosives that needed no faith in invisible deities to perform their lethal function. Faith might move mountains; but lasers cut flesh. And without flesh to sustain it, there was nothing left to harbor faith."

"Faith is the eye that sees nothing and rejoices in it."

"The idea of faith interested him, even fascinated him, not as an intellectual idea, not as a concept or some abstract theoretical framework, but as a way of controlling people, as a way of understanding and so manipulating them. As a flaw, in the end, as something which was wrong with others that was not wrong with him."

"Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy. With faith, you don't have to put any work into proving your case. You can "just believe.""

"Faith is never identical with "piety"."

"A particularly crucial battleground in today's cultural struggle between the supremacy of technology and human moral responsibility is the field of bioethics, where the very possibility of integral human development is radically called into question. In this most delicate and critical area, the fundamental question asserts itself force-fully: is man the product of his own labours or does he depend on God? Scientific discoveries in this field and the possibilities of technological intervention seem so advanced as to force a choice between two types of reasoning: reason open to transcendence or reason closed within immanence. We are presented with a clear either/ or. Yet the rationality of a self-centred use of technology proves to be irrational because it implies a decisive rejection of meaning and value. It is no coincidence that closing the door to transcendence brings one up short against a difficulty: how could being emerge from nothing, how could intelligence be born from chance? Faced with these dramatic questions, reason and faith can come to each other's assistance. Only together will they save man. Entranced by an exclusive reliance on technology, reason without faith is doomed to flounder in an illusion of its own omnipotence. Faith without reason risks being cut off from everyday life."

"Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days."

"And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you."

"Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge about things without parallel."

"An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace."

"I believe — that the Lord God created the universe. I believe — that He sent His only Son to die for my sins. And I believe — that ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America. I am a Mormon and a Mormon just believes."

"All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown In myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own."

"Orthodoxy can be learnt from others; living faith must be a matter of personal experience."

"You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it."

"Strike from mankind the principle of Faith, and men would have no more history than a flock of sheep."

"What accords better and more aptly with faith than to acknowledge ourselves divested of all virtue that we may be clothed by God, devoid of all goodness that we may be filled by Him, the slaves of sin that he may give us freedom, blind that he may enlighten, lame that he may cure, and feeble that he may sustain us; to strip ourselves of all ground of glorying that he alone may shine forth glorious, and we be glorified in him?"

"Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. … Don’t put limitations on yourself. Other people will do that for you. Don’t do that to yourself. Don’t bet against yourself. And take risk. NASA has this phrase that they like, "Failure is not an option." But failure has to be an option. In art and exploration, failure has to be an option. Because it is a leap of faith. And no important endeavour that required innovation was done without risk. You have to be willing to take those risks. … In whatever you are doing, failure is an option. But fear is not."

"I credit that eight years of grammar school with nourishing me in a direction where I could trust myself and trust my instincts. They gave me the tools to reject my faith. They taught me to question and think for myself and to believe in my instincts to such an extent that I just said, "This is a wonderful fairy tale they have going here, but it's not for me.""

"Faith is more basic than language or theology. Faith is the response to something which is calling us from the timeless part of our reality. Faith may be encouraged by what has happened in the past, or what is thought to have happened in the past, but the only proof of it is in the future. Scriptures and creeds may come to seem incredible, but faith will still go dancing on. Even though (because it rejects a doctrine) it is now described as "doubt". This, I believe, is the kind of faith that Christ commended."

"You've promised that if we come to You and ask something in faith, that You'll do it."

"I now had enough faith not only to believe there were answer, but to feel certain that those answers would become apparent at some point in the future."

"I believe that faith is a precursor of all our ideas. Without faith, there never could have evolved hypothesis, theory, science or mathematics. I believe that faith is an extension of the mind. It is the key that negates the impossible. To deny faith is to refute oneself and the spirit that generates all our creative forces. My faith is in the unknown, in all that we do not understand by reason; I believe that what is beyond our comprehension is a simple fact in other dimensions, and that in the realm of the unknown there is an infinite power for good."

"Who hath no faith to man, to God hath none."

"Others, one suspects, are afraid that the crossing of space, and above all contact with intelligent but nonhuman races, may destroy the foundations of their religious faith. They may be right, but in any event their attitude is one which does not bear logical examination — for a faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets."

"All the strength and force of man comes from his faith in things unseen. He who believes is strong; he who doubts is weak. Strong convictions precede great actions. The man strongly possessed of an idea is the master of all who are uncertain and wavering. Clear, deep, living convictions rule the world."

"In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery."

"Never yet did there exist a full faith in the Divine word which did not expand the intellect, while it purified the heart; which did not multiply the aims and objects of the understanding, while it fixed and simplified those of the desires and feelings."

"Faith makes the discords of the present, the harmonies of the future."

"'Faith' is merely fear dressed up as virtue... Faith is the grip that clergy have over you. It's the invisible rope around your neck that pulls you along the road they want you to travel, for their benefit, not yours. It's a dead-end word. It's a word of bondage. It's a word that lets you believe what you've been told to believe, without feeling that you've been told what to believe, but you have, and you can stop pretending any time you like. It's not a virtue, that's the last thing it is. It's an abdication from reality. It's a dumb act of self-hypnosis. It's a cowardly cop-out. It's gullibility with a halo, and hiding behind it is like pretending to be an invalid."

"Take courage, soul! Hold not thy strength in vain! With faith o'ercome the steeps Thy God hath set for thee. Beyond the Alpine summits of great pain Lieth thine Italy."

"His faith, perhaps, in some nice tenets might Be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was in the right."

"Faith is not a virtue, but a character flaw."

"When faith and hope fail, as they do sometimes, we must try charity, which is love in action. We must speculate no more on our duty, but simply do it. When we have done it, however blindly, perhaps Heaven will show us why."

"I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning."

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."

"It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate."

"Reason lives on the systematization of the past, but Faith is the promise of the future."

"Faith — is the Pierless Bridge Supporting what We see Unto the Scene that We do not."

"Faith is a fine invention For gentlemen who see; But Microscopes are prudent In an emergency."

"Faith sees God's face in every human face."

"Faith allows us to enter peacefully into the dark night which faces every one of us at one time or another."

"It is so important for us to have faith, trust, confidence in one another. It is the only way we can communicate. Without faith there is no communication, there is no love, or if there was a little love, it will die without hope, trust, and confidence. Even if it doesn't die right away, it will be so weak, so ill, and so tired that communication will be miserable as well."

"To take up half on trust, and half to try, Name it not faith but bungling bigotry."

"Love is no ingredient in a merely speculative faith, but it is the life and soul of a practical faith... A speculative faith consists only in the assent of the understanding, but in a saving faith there is also the consent of the heart."

"Love is the active, working principle in all true faith. It is its very soul, without which it is dead. "Faith works by love.""

"No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence."

"Faith lived in the incognito is one which is located outside the criticism coming from society, from politics, from history, for the very reason that it has itself the vocation to be a source of criticism. It is faith (lived in the incognito) which triggers the issues for the others, which causes everything seemingly established to be placed in doubt, which drives a wedge into the world of false assurances."

"I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing."

"Faith is a letting down our nets into the untranparent deeps at the divine command, not knowing what we shall take."

"Malory clung to his faith with fierce obliviousness to “facts”—in itself an indication that he had gone mad, if his critics were to be believed."

"The Way to ſee by Faith is to ſhut the Eye of Reaſon: The Morning Daylight appears plainer when you put out your Candle."

"Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love."

"Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe."

"Nimrod, becoming weary of arguing with Abraham, decided to cast him before his god--fire--and challenged Abraham's deliverance by the God of Abraham, but God saved him out of the fiery furnace. Haran too was challenged to declare his god, but halted between two opinions, and delayed his answer until he saw the result of Abraham's fate. When he saw the latter saved he declared himself on the side of Abraham's God, thinking that he too, having now become an adherent of that God, would be saved by the same miracle. But since his faith was not real, but depended on a miracle, he perished in the fire, into which like Abraham he was cast by Nimrod. This is hinted in the words (Gen. 11. 28): 'And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees.'"

"We lean on Faith; and some less wise have cried, "Behold the butterfly, the seed that's cast!" Vain hopes that fall like flowers before the blast! What man can look on Death unterrified?"

"If you find it hard to believe in me, maybe it would help you to know that I believe in you."

"Die Botschaft hör' ich wohl, allein mir fehlt der Glaube; Das Wunder ist des Glaubens liebstes Kind."

"If you have any faith, give me, for heaven's sake, a share of it! Your doubts you may keep to yourself, for I have a plenty of my own."

"Faith is a device of self-delusion, a sleight of hand done with words and emotions founded on any irrational notion that can be dreamed up. Faith is the attempt to coerce truth to surrender to whim. In simple terms, it is trying to breath life into a lie by trying to outshine reality with the beauty of wishes. Faith is the refuge of fools, the ignorant, and the deluded, not of thinking, rational men."

"Faith in an order, which is the basis of science, will not (as it cannot reasonably) be dissevered from faith in an Ordainer, which is the basis of religion."

"If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?"

"Faith of consciousness is freedom Faith of feeling is weakness Faith of body is stupidity."

"Faith cannot be given to man. Faith arises in a man and increases in its action in him not as the result of automatic learning, that is, not from any automatic ascertainment of height, breadth, thickness, form and weight, or from the perception of anything by sight, hearing, touch, smell or taste, but from understanding. Understanding is the essence obtained from information intentionally learned and from all kinds of experiences personally experienced."

"Faith is the backbone of the social and the foundation of the commercial fabric; remove faith between man and man, and society and commerce fall to pieces. There is not a happy home on earth but stands on faith; our heads are pillowed on it, we sleep at night in its arms with greater security for the safety of our lives, peace, and prosperity than bolts and bars can give."

"God comes down in the rain, And the crop grows tall— This is the country faith, And the best of all."

"Faith is a grasping of Almighty power; The hand of man laid on the arm of God; — The grand and blessed hour In which the things impossible to me Become the possible, O Lord, through Thee."

"Faith, Quinn mused, was a strange power. They had committed their lives to the sect, never questioning its gospels. Yet in all of that time, they had the reassurance of routine … The bedrock of every religion, that your God is a promise, never to be encountered in this life, this universe."

"A Faith that sets bounds to itself, that will believe so much and no more, that will trust thus far and no further, is none. It is only Doubt taking a nap in an elbow chair. The husband, whose scepticism is prurient enough to contemplate the possibility of his wife's proving false, richly deserves that she should do so."

"The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt."

"Faith is generally nothing more than the permission religious people give to one another to believe things strongly without evidence."

"I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith — it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe."

"Faith strikes me as intellectual laziness, but I don't argue with it — especially as I am rarely in a position to prove that it is mistaken. Negative proof is usually impossible."

"What sought they thus afar? Bright jewels of the mine? The wealth of seas, the spoils of war?— They sought a faith's pure shrine!"

"Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated."

"Faith is a gift of God, which man can neither give nor take away by promise of rewards or menace of torture."

"Faith draws the poison from every grief, takes the sting from every loss, and quenches the fire of every pain; and only faith can do it."

"The great act of faith is when a man decides that he is not God."

"The idealists give away their case when they write books. For it shows that they have done the great act of faith and decided that they are not God."

"Faith, as an intellectual state, is self-reliance, which, if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is not so much of a paradox as it sounds at first."

"Mirror of constant faith, revered and mourn'd!"

"My faith is great: out of the transient darkness of the present the shadows will flee away, and Day will yet dawn. I am an Anarchist. No man who believes in force and violence is an Anarchist. The true Anarchist decries all influences save those of love and reason. Ideas are his only arms. Being an Anarchist I am also a Socialist. Socialism is the antithesis of Anarchy. One is the North Pole of Truth, the other the South."

"It’s a real shame that I let something as insignificant as simple belief rob me of my right to profound experience."

"As it is with all matters of faith, though, I found nothing that could not sustain at least two interpretations."

"I believe it was Magellan who said, "The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the church.""

"Never confuse faith, or belief — of any kind — with something even remotely intellectual."

"Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith … must be born of nothingness, it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way that no philosophy of nihilism can imagine."

"Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works. Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble."

"The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may."

"It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true."

"I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith; but as soon as they have got well imbued with the logical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit my contention to be lawful philosophically, even though in point of fact they were personally chock full of some faith or other themselves."

"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."

"Truly I say to you, if you have faith, and do not doubt, you shall not only do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, "Be taken up and cast into the sea," it shall happen."

"Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

"Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee? Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him? Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather it into thy barn?"

"The German is the discipline of fear; ours is the discipline of faith — and faith will triumph."

"Be thou faithful unto death."

"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves."

"If he were To be made honest by an act of parliament I should not alter in my faith of him."

"Our faith is a light by nature coming of our endless Day, that is our Father, God. In which light our Mother, Christ, and our good Lord, the Holy Ghost, leadeth us in this passing life. This light is measured discreetly, needfully standing to us in the night. The light is cause of our life; the night is cause of our pain and of all our woe: in which we earn meed and thanks of God. For we, with mercy and grace, steadfastly know and believe our light, going therein wisely and mightily."

"Charity keepeth us in Faith and Hope, and Hope leadeth us in Charity. And in the end all shall be Charity."

"It's faith, Hawkgirl. You're not supposed to understand it... you just have it."

"The general rule is, that Truth should never be violated, because it is of the utmost importance to the comfort of life, that we should have a full security by mutual faith; and occasional inconveniences should be willingly suffered that we may preserve it. There must, however, be some exceptions. If, for instance, a murderer should ask you which way a man is gone, you may tell him what is not true, because you are under a previous obligation not to betray a man to a murderer."

"Religion is based on faith alone, and faith stands in no need of logical demonstrations, but is itself justified in postulating its content as a necessary hypothesis."

"Faith means not wanting to know what is true."

"Faith means intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person."

"The believer humanly comprehends how heavy the suffering is, but in faith’s wonder that it is beneficial to him, he devoutly says: It is light. Humanly he says: It is impossible, but he says it again in faith’s wonder that what he humanly cannot understand is beneficial to him. In other words, when sagacity is able to perceive the beneficialness, then faith cannot see God; but when in the dark night of suffering sagacity cannot see a handbreadth ahead of it, then faith can see God, since faith sees best in the dark."

"Whoever has the world’s treasures has them no matter how he got them. In the world of the spirit it is otherwise."

"The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone, which from another angle means that it applies at all times. It rests immanent in itself, has nothing outside itself that is its τέλος but is itself the τέλος for everything outside itself, and when the ethical has absorbed this into itself, it goes not further. The single individual, sensately and psychically qualified in immediacy, is the individual who has his τέλος in the universal, and it is his ethical task continually to express himself in this, to annul his singularity in order to become the universal. As soon as the single individual asserts himself in his singularity before the universal, he sins, and only by acknowledging this can he be reconciled again with the universal. ... Faith [in contrast to the ethical] is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal ... so that after having been in the universal he as the single individual isolates himself as higher than the universal."

"But faith, it keeps the lamp alight; in waiting and in expectation keeps the lamp alight to the end; and if fulfilment comes, still keeps the lamp alight, in not forgetting that it was impossible."

"The belief that God will do everything for man is as untenable as the belief that man can do everything for himself. It, too, is based on a lack of faith. We must learn that to trust God with the expectation that he will do everything while we do nothing, is not faith, but superstition."

"In a real sense faith is total surrender to God."

"Faith is taking the first step, even when you're scared shitless and don't see the whole goddamn staircase."

"We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other... except through faith."

"And we shall be made truly wise if we be made content; content, too, not only with what we can understand, but content with what we do not understand—the habit of mind which theologians call—and rightly—faith in God."

"For those who are born into atheism, it's a faith like any other. The only real atheist is an ex-believer."

"Reason is the linking together of truths, but particularly (when it is compared with faith) of those to which the human mind can attain naturally without being helped by the light of faith."

"The object of faith is the truth, which God has revealed in an extraordinary way"

"Aside from the human reasons for faith, or motives of credibility, a certain internal operation of the Holy Spirit is required which gives it the name Divine Faith and which confirms the mind in truth."

"Faith … is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods."

"Conan Antonio Motti: Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes or given you clairvoyance enough to find the Rebels' hidden fortr––"

"The faith for which God justifieth, is not an empty speculation, but a faith joined with repentance, and working by love. And for this, which was, in effect, to return to God himself, and to their natural allegiance due to him, and to advance as much as lay in them, the glory of the kingdom, which he had promised his Son ; God was pleased to declare, he would accept them, receive them to grace, and blot out all their former transgressions. This is evidently the covenant of grace, as delivered in the scriptures [...] It is a law of faith, whereby God has promised to forgive all our sins, upon our repentance and believing something ; and to impute that faith to us for righteousness..."

"The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience."

"Ye children of promise, who are awaiting your call to glory, take possession of the inheritance that now is yours. By faith take the promises. Live upon them, not upon emotions. Remember feeling is not faith. Faith grasps and clings to the promises. Faith says, "I am certain, not because feeling testifies to it, but because God says it.""

"Doubt is useful, it keeps faith a living thing. After all, you cannot know the strength of your faith until it has been tested."

"The atheists have the greatest faith: they believe that God does not exist."

"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable."

"“I know, I know,” Moore said. “Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?” Shook his head. “What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what they are? And mean exactly what they say?”"

"Not Truth, but Faith, it is That keeps the world alive."

"O welcome pure-ey'd Faith, white-handed Hope, Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings!"

"That in such righteousness To them by faith imputed they may find Justification towards God, and peace Of conscience."

"Yet I argue not Again Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot Of right or hope; but still bear up and steer Eight onward."

"Combien de choses nous servoient hier d'articles de foy, qui nous sont fables aujourd'hui!"

"Vjera se prihvaća slobodnom voljom, a ne razumom."

"But Faith, fanatic Faith, once wedded fast To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last."

"There is a faith that is enriched by the concepts of reason, and there is a reason that is enriched by the gifts of faith. (introduction, p. 6)"

"If faith produce no works, I see That faith is not a living tree. Thus faith and works together grow; No separate life they e'er can know: They're soul and body, hand and heart: What God hath joined, let no man part."

"Kindness is a mark of faith, and whoever has not kindness has not faith."

"Faith is a vice pretending to be a virtue, its lies and errors and frothy nonsense deluding us and distracting us from action. There's no salvation in wishful thinking, only inertia. Faith is the enemy of reason. The one thing every single one of us here must be united in despising is faith. It's the barren refuge of the vacuous, the fearful, the frauds, and the obstacles to accomplishment."

"Buddhism does not demand blind faith from its adherents. Here mere belief is dethroned and is substituted by confidence based on knowledge, which, in Pali, is known as Saddha. The confidence placed by a follower on the Buddha is like that of a sick person in a noted physician, or a student in his teacher."

"We may infer from any defeat of ours that it is due either to lack of faith or failure to obey. No other reason can suffice."

"Faith and God belong together somewhat as sense experience and physical reality do."

"Faith Saves.—Virtue gives happiness and a state of blessedness only to those who have a strong faith in their virtue:—not, however, to the more refined souls whose virtue consists of a profound distrust of themselves and of all virtue. After all, therefore, it is "faith that saves" here also! (214)"

"It is always a metaphysical belief on which our belief in science rests, —and that even we knowing ones of to-day, the godless and anti-metaphysical, still take our fire from the conflagration kindled by a belief a millennium old, the Christian belief, which was also the belief of Plato, that God is truth, that the truth is divine... (344)"

"That faith makes blessed under certain circumstances, that blessedness does not make of a fixed idea a true idea, that faith moves no mountains but puts mountains where there are none: a quick walk through a madhouse enlightens one sufficiently about this."

"»Glaube« heißt Nicht-wissen-wollen, was wahr ist."

"The truest visions of religion are illusions, which may be partially realised by being resolutely believed. For what religion believes to be true is not wholly true but ought to be true; and may become true if its truth is not doubted."

"Intellect separated from faith will lack the firm belief in its own power to be the guide on the path of life. Without this inner conviction it will hesitate to follow in earnest its own conclusions and commands."

"Faith may reward, but only those who believe in God — not those who believe in rewards."

"Faith is not just something you have, it's something you do."

"Orthodoxy is the ability to say two and two make five when faith requires it."

"Fear is the opposite of faith."

"“Faith,” she said gently. “But, Will darling, I just never have seen any of the mountains they say it moved.”"

"Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God."

"Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists."

"It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason."

"In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't."

"But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love."

"We walk by faith, not by sight."

"I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith."

"For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight; His can't be wrong whose life is in the right."

"The enormous faith of many made for one."

"“You strong in your faith, then?” she said, as if she couldn’t leave things alone. Oats sighed. “I try to be.” “But you read a lot of books, I’m thinking. Hard to have faith, ain’t it, when you read too many books.”"

"And nothing prevents people from believing, when the guidance comes to them, except that they say: Has Allah raised up a mortal to be a messenger? Say: Had there been in the earth angels walking about secure, We would have sent down to them from the heaven an angel as messenger. Say: Allah suffices for a witness between me and you. Surely He is ever Aware of His servants, Seeing. And he whom Allah guides, he is on the right way; and he whom He leaves in error, for them thou wilt find no guardians besides Him. And We shall gather them together on the day of Resurrection on their faces, blind and dumb and deaf. Their abode is hell. Whenever it abates, We make them burn the more. This is their retribution because they disbelieve in Our messages and say: When we are bones and decayed particles, shall we then be raised up into a new creation? See they not that Allah, Who created the heavens and the earth, is able to create the like of them? And He has appointed for them a term, whereof there is no doubt. But the wrongdoers consent to naught but denying."

"What is wanted is not the will-to-believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite."

"We may define "faith" as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of "faith". We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence."

"If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather then by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called "education". This last is particularly dastardly, since it takes advantage of the defencelessness of immature minds. Unfortunately it is practiced in greater or less degree in the schools of every civilised country."

"Faith is cold as ice. Why are little ones born only to suffer for the want of immunity or a bowl of rice? Well, who would hold a price on the heads of the innocent children if there's some immortal power to control the dice?"

"Faith is clearly not enough for many people. They crave hard evidence, scientific proof. They long for the scientific seal of approval, but are unwilling to put up with the rigorous standards of evidence that impart credibility to that seal."

"Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine."

"Faith: The opposite of dogmatism."

"There are three lessons I would write, — Three words — as with a burning pen, In tracings of eternal light Upon the hearts of men. Have Hope. Though clouds environ now, And gladness hides her face in scorn, Put thou the shadow from thy brow, — No night but hath its morn. Have Faith. Where'er thy bark is driven, — The calm's disport, the tempest's mirth, — Know this: God rules the hosts of heaven, The habitants of earth. Have Love. Not love alone for one, But men, as man, thy brothers call; And scatter, like the circling sun, Thy charities on all. Thus grave these lessons on thy soul, — Hope, Faith, and Love, — and thou shalt find Strength when life's surges rudest roll, Light when thou else wert blind."

"[A]re you tough enough to have faith in the things worthy of faith? A belief in your own particular God … an adherence to the tenets of your particular religion … all this with a decent regard and respect for the God and religions of others. Believe without proselytizing. Believe without peddling. Believe without working both sides of the street, trying to sell to others that which is uniquely your own. But most major here, simply believe. There’s no alternative to faith … and God help us, there’s no salvation without it."

"Reason ambitions only a world; faith gives it infinity."

"Lack of faith doesn’t always make people secular. It often makes them seek out substitutes which provide some of the same things found in traditional religions, i.e. an all-encompassing view of the world, a sense of right and wrong, a place in which they belong and feel at home, etc... [T]hose are real human needs that almost everyone feels in some sense or another."

"Set on your foot, And with a heart new-fir'd I follow you, To do I know not what: but it sufficeth That Brutus leads me on."

"Thou almost makest me waver in my faith To hold opinion with Pythagoras, That souls of animals infuse themselves Into the trunks of men."

"In science, all conclusions are provisional, subject to new evidence and better arguments, the very antithesis of religious faith."

"Faith ... is the unspoiled seed, the cause of abilities; Faith grows into the tree of Awakening."

"In People with no faith Bright qualities do not grow, Just as a green sprout Never grows from seeds burned by fire."

"Christian faith merely substitutes, provisionally, for clear knowledge: statements of the Holy Scripture on this subject are unmistakable."

"The saddest thing that can befall a soul Is when it loses faith in God and woman."

"Beware of doubt—faith is the subtle chain, Which binds us to the infinite; the voice Of a deep life within, that will remain Until we crowd it thence."

"It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him."

"Faith creates the foundation for conviction."

"As men's habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude … that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honoured save justice and charity."

"That's the thing about faith. If you don't have it, you can't understand it. And if you do, no explanation is necessary."

"Faith is the key that unlocks the cabinet of God's treasures; the king's messenger from the celestial world, to bring all the supplies we need out of the fullness that there is in Christ."

"Faith is something that cannot be won through intimidation and fear."

"Faith in a better than that which appears, is no less required by art than by religion."

"I heard once of an American who so defined faith, "that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue." For one, I follow that man. He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of the big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him, but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe."

"Faith is a beautiful thing. So are forest fires, and the color of gangrene. I think faith—especially capital-F Faith—is more dangerous and more disgusting than either. It is a substitute for thought."

"Now, there remain faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love."

"By faith Noah, after receiving divine warning of things not yet seen, showed godly fear and constructed an ark for the saving of his household; and through this faith he condemned the world, and he became an heir of the righteousness that results from faith."

"How sweet to have a common faith! To hold a common scorn of death!"

"Whose faith has centre everywhere, Nor cares to fix itself to form."

"Faith and unfaith can ne'er be equal powers; Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all."

"Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith."

"Whatever answers faith gives, regardless of which faith, or to whom the answers are given, such answers always give an infinite meaning to the finite existence of man; a meaning that is not destroyed by suffering, deprivation or death. This means only in faith can we find the meaning and possibility of life."

"There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so.""

"Doubt, indeed, is the disease of this inquisitive, restless age. It is the price we pay for our advanced intelligence and civilization. It is the dim night of our resplendent day. But as the most beautiful light is born of darkness, so the faith which springs from conflict is often the strongest and the best."

"Those who do not doubt do not believe. Faith is maintained by resolving doubts, and again resolving those further doubts which are suggested by the resolution of previous doubts."

"I think that everything that is really good and beautiful, the inner, moral, spiritual and sublime beauty in men and their works, comes from God, and everything that is bad and evil in the works of men and in men is not from God, and God does not approve of it. But I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things. Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road to understanding Him better, that is what I keep telling myself. But you must love with a sublime, genuine, profound sympathy, with devotion, with intelligence, and you must try all the time to understand Him more, better and yet more. That will lead to God, that will lead to an unshakeable faith."

"This saving faith is the perceiving, believing, and resting upon a fact — the atoning death of Jesus Christ. The failure to understand this is one fruitful cause of the confusion in many minds about this subject. For not unfrequently persons are looking into their own hearts, and trying to discover whether they have faith or not, instead of looking away from themselves altogether at the object of faith."

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile."

"Faith is seated in the understanding as well as in the will. It has an eye to see Christ as well as a wing to fly to Christ."

"Faith, though it hath sometimes a trembling hand, it must not have a withered hand, but must stretch."

"Everywhere, always, in everything, the social feeling produces a perfect imitation of faith, that is to say perfectly deceptive. This imitation has the great advantage of satisfying every part of the soul. That which longs for goodness believes it is fed. That which is mediocre is not hurt by the light; it is quite at ease. Thus everyone is in agreement. The soul is at peace. But Christ said that he did not come to bring peace. He brought a sword, the sword that severs in two, as Aeschylus says."

"Whatever faith you have, you ought to be willing to confront it with the discoveries of science."

"I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world."

"Faith, mighty faith the promise sees And rests on that alone; Laughs at impossibilities, And says it shall be done."

"Through this dark and stormy night Faith beholds a feeble light Up the blackness streaking; Knowing God's own time is best, In a patient hope I rest For the full day-breaking!"

"A bending staff I would not break, A feeble faith I would not shake, Nor even rashly pluck away The error which some truth may stay, Whose loss might leave the soul without A shield against the shafts of doubt."

"How scrumptious to be faithful! But utterly irrelevant to whether or not the opinion in question is true. Whatever the finer feelings associated with faith, no matter how elevated those who indulge in it, from the point of view of truth and evidence, faith is exactly the same as prejudice. Declaring an opinion to be a matter of faith provides it with no new evidential support, gives no new reason to think it true. It merely acknowledges that you have none."

"Thomas Daggett: Some people lose their faith because Heaven shows them too little. But how many people lose their faith because Heaven showed them too much?"

"The faith of immortality gives to every mind that cherishes it a certain firmness of texture."

"Scepticism is the beginning of faith."

"Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something."

"Of one in whom persuasion and belief Had ripened into faith, and faith become A passionate intuition."

"'Tis hers to pluck the amaranthine flower Of Faith, and round the sufferer's temples bind Wreaths that endure affliction's heaviest shower, And do not shrink from sorrow's keenest wind."

"A faith that can be destroyed by suffering is not faith."

"Faith builds a bridge across the gulf of Death, To break the shock blind nature cannot shun, And lands Thought smoothly on the further shore."

"When the desert asks for water, the sky sends clouds."

"Most people will never know anything beyond what they see with their own two eyes."

"Help me, O Lord, my strength and rock; Lo at the door I hear death’s knock. Uplift Thine arm once pierced for me; That conquered death and set me free. Yet if Thy voice in life’s midday, Recalls my soul, then I obey. In faith and hope Earth I resign; Secure of heaven, For I am Thine!"

"The dawn is overcast, the morning lowers, And heavily in clouds brings on the day, The great, the important day, big with the fate Of Cato, and of Rome."

"I am the prince who decides the destiny of rolling rivers. I keep on the straight and narrow path the righteous who follow Enlil's counsel. [...] If I fix a fate, who shall alter it? If I but say the word, who shall change it?"

"For whatever reasons, Ray, call it . . . fate, call it luck, call it karma. I believe everything happens for a reason. I believe that we were destined to get thrown out of this dump."

"Fate has a way of circling back on a man, and taking him by surprise. A man sees things differently at different times in his life. This town didn't seem the same now that he was older."

"The heart is its own Fate."

"There's nothing you can know that isn't known Nothing you can see that isn't shown There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be It's easy"

"Let those deplore their doom, Whose hope still grovels in this dark sojourn: But lofty souls, who look beyond the tomb, Can smile at Fate, and wonder how they mourn."

"There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learnt to separate them. Desire, the strongest thing in the world, is itself all future, and it is not for nothing that in all the religions the motive is always forwards to an endless futurity of bliss or annihilation. Now that religion gives place to science the paradisical future of the soul fades before the Utopian future of the species, and still the future rules. But always there is, on the other side, destiny, that which inevitably will happen, a future here concerned not as the other was with man and his desires, but blindly and inexorably with the whole universe of space and time. The Buddhist seeks to escape from the Wheel of Life and Death, the Christian passes through them in the faith of another world to come, the modern reformer, as unrealistic but less imaginative, demands his chosen future in this world of men. Can we in any better way reconcile desire and fate?"

"There is no fate but what we make."

"Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat."

"Many things happen between the cup and the lip."

"Success, the mark no mortal wit, Or surest hand, can always hit: For whatsoe'er we perpetrate, We do but row, we're steer'd by Fate, Which in success oft disinherits, For spurious causes, noblest merits."

"Don't let them tell us stories. Don't let them say of the man sentenced to death "He is going to pay his debt to society," but: "They are going to cut off his head." It looks like nothing. But it does make a little difference. And then there are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye."

"Fate is created, not ordained."

"Fate was turning a page in her Book of Delusions."

"Fate steals along with silent tread, Found oftenest in what least we dread; Frowns in the storm with angry brow, But in the sunshine strikes the blow."

"Le sort fait les parents, la choix fait les amis."

"He has gone to the demnition bow-wows."

"Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point, answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that May be only?"

"Fate has carried me 'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand— Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breast To pierce another."

"People are the pawns of fate."

"Marty, the future isn't written. It can be changed. You know that. Anyone can make their future whatever they want it to be."

"How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is."

"Adam: Nature mandates that mankind will eventually succumb to its poison. However, humans created their own poison, called medicine. It's delusional to believe you can poison Nature to avoid your fate."

"We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out."

"Naomi: Each person is born with their fate written into their own genetic code... it's unchangeable, immutable... But that's not all there is to life. I finally realized that. I told you before. The reason that I was interested in genes and DNA. Because I wanted to know who I was... where I came from. I thought that if I analyzed my DNA I could find out who I was, who my parents were. And I thought that if I knew that, then I'd know what path I should take in life. But I was wrong. I didn't find anything. I didn't learn anything. Just like with the Genome Soldiers... you can input all the genetic information, but that doesn't make them into the strongest soldiers. The most we can say about DNA is that it governs a person's potential strengths... potential destiny. You mustn't allow yourself to be chained to fate... to be ruled by your genes. Humans can choose the type of life they want to live."

"There is no such thing as a historical fatality; there is only a historical nemesis which punishes those who have hesitated to act when action was still possible."

"'Tis strange how the heart can create Or colour from itself its fate; We make ourselves our own distress, We are ourselves our happiness."

"All are architects of Fate, Working in these walls of Time; Some with massive deeds and great, Some with ornaments of rhyme."

"Everything is preordained. Even my responses."

"We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us."

"So long as it fated, fate didn’t care what it fated."

"Fool, don't you know you cannot change your fate."

"Fate is Never Final."

"I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing."

"Eat, speak, and move, under the influence of the most received star; and though the devil lead the measure such are to be followed."

"My fate cries out, And makes each petty artery in this body As hardy as the Numean lion's nerve."

"Our wills and fates do so contrary run That our devices still are overthrown; Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own."

"O God! that one might read the book of fate, And see the revolutions of the times Make mountains level, and the continent Weary of solid firmness, melt itself Into the sea!"

"What fates impose, that men must needs abide; It boots not to resist both wind and tide."

"If thou read this, O Cæsar, thou mayst live; If not, the Fates with traitors do contrive."

"Fates, we will know your pleasures: That we shall die we know; 'tis but the time And drawing days out, that men stand upon."

"What should be spoken here, where our fate, Hid within an auger-hole, may rush, and seize us?"

"But yet I'll make assurance double sure, And take a bond of fate: thou shalt not live."

"But, O vain boast! Who can control his fate?"

"You fools! I and my fellows Are ministers of Fate; the elements Of whom your swords are temper'd, may as well Wound the loud winds, or with bemock'd-at stabs Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish One dowle that's in my plume."

"Fate, show thy force; ourselves we do not owe; What is decreed must be, and be this so."

"As the old hermit of Prague … said,… "That that is, is.""

"Let me tell you about my fate: it is an insult. Let me explain it to you: it is a disgrace. Were I to tell my neighbour about my fate, he would heap insults upon me. I looked into the water. My destiny was drifting past. I was born on an ill-fated day."

"Fate is a dog, well able to bite."

"Fate is a raging storm blowing over the Land."

"A pig which was about to be slaughtered by the pig-butcher squealed. (The butcher said:) "Your ancestors and forebears walked this road, and now you too are walking it, so why are you squealing?""

"Fate is a wet bank; it can make one slip."

"Human effort can be used for self-betterment and that there is no such thing as an external fate imposed by the gods."

"Durate, et vosmet rebus servate secundis."

"Vivite felices, quibus est fortuna peracta Jam sua: nos alia ex aliis in fata vocamur."

"The Oracle: You're going to have to make a choice. In the one hand you'll have Morpheus' life and in the other hand you'll have your own. One of you is going to die. Which one will be up to you. I'm sorry, kiddo, I really am. You have a good soul, and I hate giving good people bad news. Oh, don't worry about it. As soon as you step outside that door, you'll start feeling better. You'll remember you don't believe in any of this fate crap. You're in control of your own life, remember? Here, take a cookie. I promise, by the time you're done eating it, you'll feel right as rain."

"Wyrd bið ful aræd."

"GaeS a wyrd swa hio scel."

"The bow is bent, the arrow flies, The wingéd shaft of fate."

"Yet who shall shut out Fate?"

"Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why, then, should we desire to be deceived?"

"Here's a sigh to those who love me, And a smile to those who hate; And whatever sky's above me, Here's a heart for every fate."

"To bear is to conquer our fate."

"Le vin est versé, il faut le boire."

"Tolluntur in altum Ut lapsu graviore ruant."

"All human things are subject to decay, And when fate summons, monarchs must obey."

"'Tis Fate that flings the dice, And as she flings Of kings makes peasants, And of peasants kings."

"Stern fate and time Will have their victims; and the best die first, Leaving the bad still strong, though past their prime, To curse the hopeless world they ever curs'd, Vaunting vile deeds, and vainest of the worst."

"On est, quand on veut, maître de son sort."

"One common fate we both must prove; You die with envy, I with love."

"Du musst (herrschen und gewinnen, Oder dienen und verlieren, Leiden oder triumphiren), Amboss oder Hammer sein."

"Der Mensch erfährt, er sei auch wer er mag, Ein letztes Glück und einen letzten Tag."

"Each curs'd his fate that thus their project cross'd; How hard their lot who neither won nor lost."

"Yet, ah! why should they know their fate, Since sorrow never comes too late, And happiness too swiftly flies? Thought would destroy their paradise."

"Though men determine, the gods doo dispose: and oft times many things fall out betweene the cup and the lip."

"Why doth IT so and so, and ever so, This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel?"

"'Tis writ on Paradise's gate, "Woe to the dupe that yields to Fate!""

"ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων"

"Toil is the lot of all, and bitter woe The fate of many."

"Jove lifts the golden balances that show The fates of mortal men, and things below."

"And not a man appears to tell their fate."

"With equal pace, impartial Fate Knocks at the palace, as the cottage gate."

"Sæpius ventis agitatur ingens Pinus, et celsæ graviore casu Decidunt terres feriuntque summos Fulgura montes."

"East, to the dawn, or west or south or north! Loose rein upon the neck of—and forth!"

"I do not know beneath what sky Nor on what seas shall be thy fate; I only know it shall be high, I only know it shall be great."

"Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?"

"Even if there were exceedingly few things in a finite space in an infinite time, they would not have to repeat in the same configurations. Suppose there were three wheels of equal size, rotating on the same axis, one point marked on the circumference of each wheel, and these three points lined up in one straight line. If the second wheel rotated twice as fast as the first, and if the speed of the third wheel was 1/π of the speed of the first, the initial line-up would never recur."

"Blue! Gentle cousin of the forest-green, Married to green in all the sweetest flowers— Forget-me-not,—the blue bell,—and, that queen Of secrecy, the violet: what strange powers Hast thou, as a mere shadow! But how great, When in an Eye thou art alive with fate!"

"The karma of cruelty is the most terrible of all. The fate of the cruel must fall also upon all who go out intentionally to kill God's creatures, and call it "sport"."

"Just to save himself a few minutes' trouble, a man does not pay his workmen on the proper day, thinking nothing of the difficulties he brings upon them. So much suffering is caused just by carelessness — by forgetting to think how an action will affect others. But karma never forgets, and it takes no account of the fact that men forget."

"Fate holds the strings, and Men like children move But as they're led: Success is from above."

"Some things are fixed, some things are in flux. Pompeii is fixed."

"No one is so accursed by fate, No one so utterly desolate, But some heart, though unknown, Responds unto his own."

"A millstone and the human heart are driven ever round, If they have nothing else to grind, they must themselves be ground."

"Kabira wept when he beheld the millstone roll, Of that which passes 'twixt the stones, nought goes forth whole."

"In se magna ruunt: lætis hunc numina rebus Crescendi posuere modum."

"Sed quo fata trahunt, virtus secura sequetur."

"Nulla vis humana vel virtus meruisse unquam potuit, ut, quod præscripsit fatalis ordo, non fiat."

"It lies not in our power to love or hate, For will in us is over-rul'd by fate."

"Earth loves to gibber o'er her dross, Her golden souls, to waste; The cup she fills for her god-men Is a bitter cup to taste."

"For him who fain would teach the world The world holds hate in fee— For Socrates, the hemlock cup; For Christ, Gethsemane."

"He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, That dares not put it to the touch To gain or lose it all."

"Nullo fata loco possis excludere."

"All the great things of life are swiftly done, Creation, death, and love the double gate. However much we dawdle in the sun We have to hurry at the touch of Fate."

"And sing to those that hold the vital shears; And turn the adamantine spindle round, On which the fate of gods and men is wound."

"Fixed, fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute."

"Necessity and chance Approach not me, and what I will is fate."

"The Moving Finger writes; and having writ, Moves on; nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."

"Big with the fate of Rome."

"Geminos, horoscope, varo Producis genio."

""Thou shalt see me at Philippi," was the remark of the spectre which appeared to Brutus in his tent at Abydos [B.C. 42]. Brutus answered boldly: "I will meet thee there." At Philippi the spectre reappeared, and Brutus, after being defeated, died upon his own sword."

"But blind to former as to future fate, What mortal knows his pre-existent state?"

"Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate."

"A brave man struggling in the storms of fate."

"As the bird by wandering, as the swallow by flying, so the curse causeless shall not come."

"He putteth down one and setteth up another."

"Fate sits on these dark battlements, and frowns; And as the portals open to receive me, Her voice, in sullen echoes, through the courts, Tells of a nameless deed."

"Sæpe calamitas solatium est nosse sortem suam."

"Der Zug des Herzens ist des Schicksals Stimme."

"Mach deine Rechnung mit dem Himmel, Vogt! Fort musst du, deine Uhr ist abgelaufen."

"Fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt."

"Multi ad fatum Venere suum dum fata timent."

"Nemo fit fato nocens."

"Yet what are they, the learned and the great? Awhile of longer wonderment the theme! Who shall presume to prophesy their date, Where nought is certain save the uncertainty of fate?"

"Two shall be born, the whole wide world apart, And speak in different tongues, and have no thought Each of the other's being; and have no heed; And these, o'er unknown seas to unknown lands Shall cross, escaping wreck, defying death; And, all unconsciously, shape every act to this one end: That one day out of darkness they shall meet And read life's meanings in each other's eyes."

"Jacta alea esto. (Jacta est alea.)"

"From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea."

"Sometimes an hour of Fate's serenest weather Strikes through our changeful sky its coming beams; Somewhere above us, in elusive ether, Waits the fulfilment of our dearest dreams."

"Ad restim mihi quidem res rediit planissume."

"Dare fatis vela."

"Quo fata trahunt retrahuntque sequamur."

"Fata viam invenient."

"Perge; decet. Forsan miseros meliora sequentur."

"Fata vocant."

"I saw him even now going the way of all flesh."

"Ah me! what boots us all our boasted power, Our golden treasure, and our purple state. They cannot ward the inevitable hour, Nor stay the fearful violence of fate."

"This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin."

"Blindlings that er blos den Willen des Geschickes."

"Des Schiksals Zwang ist bjtter."

"My fearful trust "en vogant la galère." (Come what may.)"

"Victory awaits him who has everything in order — luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck."

"No amount of careful planning can beat pure luck."

"Careful planning is no substitute for dumb luck."

"“It was just good luck, last minute luck.” “Your ‘luck’ was mostly sweat and intuition.”"

"With any luck. Stark smiled cynically. Not that he did not believe in luck. Rather, he had found it to be an uncertain ally."

"As ill-luck would have it."

"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have."

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"

"I don't watch the ball. I watch them. Like I said — You make your own luck. Perception is reality. And it doesn't matter a tuppeny toss where the ball actually lands... Just as long as they see what I want them to see."

"As they who make Good luck a god count all unlucky men."

"Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: It was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at the time, or, it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect."

"Some say I lucked up; I call it perfect timing."

"Some of you will be successful, and such will need but little philosophy to take them home in cheerful spirits; others will be disappointed, and will be in a less happy mood. To such, let it be said, “Lay it not too much to heart.” Let them adopt the maxim, “Better luck next time”; and then, by renewed exertion, make that better luck for themselves."

"Happy art thou, as if every day thou hadst picked up a horseshoe."

"In my experience, there's no such thing as luck."

"Sometimes luck is with you and sometimes it's not with you. That's the way life is."

"“I trust to luck to get me by. Luck and destiny.” His eyes were bright with reflected moonlight. “Sometimes they serve me well.”"

"No one I met at this time — doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients — failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all."

"Luck is where preparation meets opportunity."

"The harder I practice, the luckier I get."

"Elisa Maza: You have to quit! He's using you!"

"Luck is the residue of design."

"As Bob Dylan forgot to say, "To live outside the law, you must be lucky.""

"I don't need luck, Sarge. I was born lucky!"

"Luck can only get you so far."

"Sed res docuit id verum esse, quod in carminibus Appius ait, fabrum esse suae quemque fortunae."

"By the luckiest stars."

"When mine hours were nice and lucky."

"And good luck go with thee."

"As good luck would have it."

"Good luck lies in odd numbers * * * They say there is divinity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance, or death."

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em."

"Luck is infatuated with the efficient."

"Good luck in most cases comes through the misfortune of others."

"The lucky man is honored ... But earnest striving wins no praise at all."

"The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren't and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why."

"It reminds us that a man driven to desire to possess a certain female is a highly purposive individual. We have already noted that evolution tends to mark time when individuals have no reason to evolve. The same applies to individuals; they may be talented and intelligent, and yet waste their lives because they somehow lack the motivation to make use of these faculties. The best piece of luck that can befall any individual is to have a strong sense of purpose."

"We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits."

"O, once in each man's life, at least, Good luck knocks at his door; And wit to seize the flitting guest Need never hunger more. But while the loitering idler waits Good luck beside his fire, The bold heart storms at fortune's gates, And conquers its desire."

"A farmer travelling with his load Picked up a horseshoe on the road, And nailed it fast to his barn door, That luck might down upon him pour; That every blessing known in life Might crown his homestead and his wife, And never any kind of harm Descend upon his growing farm."

"Now for good lucke, cast an old shooe after mee."

"Some people are so fond of ill-luck that they run half-way to meet it."

"Felix ille tamen corvo quoque rarior albo."

""Then here goes another," says he, "to make sure, For there's luck in odd numbers," says Rory O'More."

"Good luck befriend thee, Son; for at thy birth The fairy ladies danced upon the hearth."

"And wheresoe'er thou move, good luck Shall fling her old shoe after."

"In the midst of the disguises and artifices that reign among men, it is only attention and vigilance that can save us from surprises."

"FIB, n. A lie that has not cut its teeth. An habitual liar's nearest approach to truth: the perigee of his eccentric orbit."

"LIAR, n. A lawyer with a roving commission."

"If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it."

"Untruths are thieves, robbing us of our birthright."

"And what is right speech? Abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, and from idle chatter: This is called right speech."

"Having abandoned false speech, the recluse Gotama abstains from falsehood. He speaks only the truth, he lives devoted to truth; trustworthy and reliable, he does not deceive anyone in the world."

"Resolved to die in the last dyke of prevarication."

"Quoth Hudibras, I smell a rat; Ralpho, thou dost prevaricate."

"And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but The truth in masquerade."

"I tell him, if a clergyman, he lies! If captains the remark, or critics, make, Why they lie also—under a mistake."

"Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds."

"A small lie needs a bodyguard of bigger lies to protect it."

"All full of lies."

"Mankind are not held together by lies. Trust is the foundation of society. Where there is no truth, there can be no trust, and where there is no trust, there can be no society. Where there is society, there is trust, and where there is trust, there is something upon which it is supported."

"To lie is so vile, that even if it were in speaking well of godly things it would take off something from God's grace; and Truth is so excellent, that if it praises but small things they become noble."

"Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness; and this truth is in itself so excellent that, even when it dwells on humble and lowly matters, it is still infinitely above uncertainty and lies, disguised in high and lofty discourses; because in our minds, even if lying should be their fifth element, this does not prevent that the truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects, though not of wandering wits. But you who live in dreams are better pleased by the sophistical reasons and frauds of wits in great and uncertain things, than by those reasons which are certain and natural and not so far above us."

"Fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth."

"Ideas have consequences, and so do lies."

"Lying is such a central characteristic of life that better understanding of it is relevant to almost all human affairs. Some might shudder at that statement, because they view lying as reprehensible."

"What I have termed micro expressions, very fast facial movements lasting less than one-fifth of a second, are one important source of leakage, revealing an emotion a person is trying to conceal. A false expression can be betrayed in a number of ways: it is usually very slightly asymmetrical, and it lacks smoothness in the way it flows on and off the face."

"It is not a lie to keep the truth to oneself."

"Can you hear them? They talk about us, telling lies. Well, that's no surprise."

"As we all know, the most effective lies are the ones sprinkled with the most actual truths."

"I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth."

"We discovered there were some Eastern Europeans who could defeat the polygraph at any time. Americans are not very good at it, because we are raised to tell the truth and when we lie it is easy to tell we are lying. But we find a lot of Europeans and Asiatics can handle that polygraph without a blip, and you know they are lying and you have evidence that they are lying."

"Half the world knows not how the other half lies."

"Show me a liar, and I will show thee a thief."

"Children and fooles can not ly."

"Trump undermines the free press because he wants to be the only legitimate source of information in society. He lies all the time to break down the processes by which we discern the truth about the world around us, and compile the observations and facts which make up the tapestry of reality. He has exposed the paper-thin vulnerability of our democratic society, which depends mightily on observing social norms—like yielding to shame—and a shared acceptance of some common set of truths.The American president is determined to bulldoze this architecture of social structures, and usher in an era where force, not deliberation and cooperation, determines the path our society will take. If he never acknowledges any truth besides his own, he never has to do anything outside his own direct interests. He does not have to actually respond to any kind of criticism, or ever reconsider his course of action. Relentless lying, after all, is a form of coercion, in which you bend others to your will by forcing them to accept the infrastructure of your false reality—or to give up caring whether anything is true or false in the first place. Don't believe your eyes and ears. Everybody was cheering for me."

"You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies."

"Education has paralleled the life of prospering white America: it has been characterized by reverence for efficiency, cultivation of competence unattended by concern for aim, big white lies, and the mainly successful blackout of Black life."

"One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so."

"By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. A man who himself does not believe what he tells another […] has even less worth than if he were a mere thing […] makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself."

"His supposed mythomania [of Diego Rivera] is in direct relation to his tremendous imagination. That is to say, he is as much of a liar as the poets or as the children who have not yet been turned into idiots by school or mothers. I have heard him tell all kinds of lies: from the most innocent, to the most complicated stories about people whom his imagination combined in a fantastic situation or actions, always with a great sense of humor and a marvelous critical sense; but I have never heard him say a single stupid or banal lie. Lying, or playing at lying, he unmasks many people, he learns the interior mechanism of others, who are much more ingenuously liars than he, and the most curious thing about the supposed lies of Diego, is that in the long and short of it, those who are involved in the imaginary combination become angry, not because of the lie, but because of the truth contained in the lie, that always comes to the surface."

"Drummond: All shine, and no substance! Bert, whenever you see something bright, shining, perfect-seeming—all gold, with purple spots—look behind the paint! And if it’s a lie—show it up for what it really is!"

"A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old."

"My body aches from mistakes betrayed by lust We lied to each other so much that in nothing we trust."

"For no falsehood can endure Touch of celestial temper."

"By telling a single lie to oneself or to another, by denying a single fact of the world as it has been created, one adds to the World’s Pain."

"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour."

"There's a lot of lying in modern finance. ... I don't like lying."

"If there is a punishment for telling the truth, then many people will tell lies. If telling lies is incentivized, then many people will tell lies. And if you allow mobs of people online or off to intimidate people and don’t stand up to them, then many people will be intimidated. And they will change what they say accordingly."

"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil."

"What’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s — it was like — we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment. — Texas A&M University (April 15, 2019)"

"The Book of Daniel is especially fitted to be a battle-ground between faith and unbelief. It admits of no half-way measures. It is either Divine or an imposture. To write any book under the name of another, and to give it out to be his, is, in any case, a forgery, dishonest in itself, and destructive of all trustworthiness. But the case as to the Book of Daniel, if it were not his, would go far beyond even this. The writer, were he not Daniel, must have lied on a most frightful scale."

"The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie."

"He will lie, sir, with such volubility, that you would think truth were a fool."

"To lapse in fulness Is sorer than to lie for need, and falsehood Is worse in kings than beggars."

"Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth."

"'Tis as easy as lying."

"These lies are like the father that begets them; gross as a mountain, open, palpable."

"Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying! I grant you I was down and out of breath; and so was he: but we rose both at an instant and fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock."

"For my part, if a lie may do thee grace, I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have."

"Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to the vice of lying!"

"Whose tongue soe'er speaks false, Not truly speaks; who speaks not truly, lies."

"An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek; A goodly apple rotten at the heart: O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!"

"Stop! I am not a real Sharkslayer! I lied."

"Everybody lies."

"It is better to be poor and walk in integrity than to be stupid and speak lies."

"A lie never lives to be old."

"An occasional little white lie such as Weston's probably won't cause any lasting damage. And at times, telling the truth—particularly the whole truth to a child who's not at an age to handle it—may do more harm than good, they say."

"Tell a lie and then tell the truth: it will be considered a lie."

"As long as you live you should not increase evil by telling lies; for if you do, to succumb will be your lot."

"When liars enter by the city gate, in front of them there is a finger pointing at them, behind them there is a finger pointing at them."

"I mean you lie—under a mistake."

"If you want truth to go round the world you must hire an express train to pull it. But if you want a lie to go round the world, it will fly; it is light as a feather and a breath will carry it."

"But he that sows lies in the end shall not lack of a harvest, and soon he may rest from toil indeed, while others reap and sow in his stead."

"The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. … How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!"

"“I don’t think he (Branch Rickey) would lie,” said Red Smith, “but he was so good at evasion, at circumlocution, that he didn’t have to lie.”"

"When hope lies dead—ah, when 'tis death to live, And wrongs remembered make the heart still bleed, Better are Sleep's kind lies for Life's blind need Than truth, if lies a little peace can give."

"Now all the truth is out, Be secret and take defeat From any brazen throat, For how can you compete, Being honor bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbors’ eyes?"

"There is no liar like the one who lies to himself. He has a fool indeed for an audience."

"A giurar presti i mentitor son sempre."

"Se non volea pulir sua scusa tanto, Che la facesse di menzogna rea."

"And none speaks false, when there is none to hear."

"You lie—under a mistake— For this is the most civil sort of lie That can be given to a man's face, I now Say what I think."

"Ita enim finitima sunt falsa veris ut in præcipitem locum non debeat se sapiens committere."

"Mendaci homini ne verum quidem dicenti credere solemus."

"The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples—that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at."

"An experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite picturesque liar."

"Un menteur est toujours prodigue de serments."

"Il faut bonne mémoire après qu'on a menti."

"Some truth there was, but dash'd and brew'd with lies, To please the fools, and puzzle all the wise."

"Wenn ich irre kann es jeder bemerken; wenn ich lüge, nicht."

"As ten millions of circles can never make a square, so the united voice of myriads cannot lend the smallest foundation to falsehood."

"Dare to be true: nothing can need a lie; A fault which needs it most, grows two thereby."

"Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all."

"Who dares think one thing, and another tell, My heart detests him as the gates of hell."

"Urge him with truth to frame his fair replies; And sure he will; for wisdom never lies."

"For my part getting up seems not so easy By half as lying."

"Splendide mendax."

"Round numbers are always false."

"Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus."

"Qui ne sent point assez ferme de memoire, ne se doit pas mêler d'être menteur."

"Hercle audivi esse optimum mendacium. Quicquid dei dicunt, id rectum est dicere."

"Playing the Cretan with the Cretans (i.e. lying to liars)."

"Some lie beneath the churchyard stone, And some before the Speaker."

"I said in my haste, All men are liars."

"Mendacem memorem esse oportet."

"Ce mensonge immortel."

"Had I a heart for falsehood framed. I ne'er could injure you."

"This shows that liars ought to have good memories."

"That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies; That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright— But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight."

"And he that does one fault at first, And lies to hide it, makes it two."

"An animal may be cunning and ferocious enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie."

"I give him joy that's awkward at a lie."

"There has always been a belief in miracles in the popular mind. As L. Sprague de Camp once said, the public would rather be bunked than debunked."

"Every believer is God's miracle."

"Man's need of self-esteem entails the need for a sense of control over reality – but no control is possible in a universe which, by one's own concession, contains the supernatural, the miraculous and the causeless, a universe in which one is at the mercy of ghosts and demons, in which one must deal, not with the unknown, but with the unknowable; no control is possible if man proposes, but a ghost disposes; no control is possible if the universe is a haunted house."

"The proper course, therefore, is, in the first instance, to ascertain and examine the doctrine; ... then after it has been proved, but not till then, it may receive confirmation from miracles. But the mark of sound doctrine given by our Saviour himself is its tendency to promote the glory not of men, but of God (John 7:18; 8:50). Our Saviour having declared this to be test of doctrine, we are in error if we regard as miraculous, works which are used for any other purpose than to magnify the name of God."

"Being a miracle doesn't mean it's mysterious. Being a miracle means it's beautiful and important."

"“I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a goddam miracle, that’s what it is.” “Come, now,” the older man murmured. “I don’t believe in miracles—neither do you.”"

"A miracle: a chance distribution of events, occurring one time in a billion."

"Nimrod, becoming weary of arguing with Abraham, decided to cast him before his god--fire--and challenged Abraham's deliverance by the God of Abraham, but God saved him out of the fiery furnace. Haran too was challenged to declare his god, but halted between two opinions, and delayed his answer until he saw the result of Abraham's fate. When he saw the latter saved he declared himself on the side of Abraham's God, thinking that he too, having now become an adherent of that God, would be saved by the same miracle. But since his faith was not real, but depended on a miracle, he perished in the fire, into which like Abraham he was cast by Nimrod. This is hinted in the words (Gen. 11. 28): 'And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees.'"

"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish."

"Man is the miracle in nature. God Is the One Miracle to man. Behold, "There is a God," thou sayest. Thou sayest well: In that thou sayest all. To Be is more Of wonderful, than being, to have wrought, Or reigned, or rested."

"The miracles of earth are the laws of heaven."

"Miracles were nonsense, mere coping mechanisms."

"A miracle is a supernatural event, whose antecedent forces are beyond our finite vision, whose design is the display of almighty power for the accomplishment of almighty purposes, and whose immediate result, as regards man, is his recognition of God as the Supreme Ruler of all things, and of His will as the only supreme law."

"It was a great thing to open the eyes of a blind man, but it is a greater thing to open the eyes of a blind soul. It was a great thing to bring a dead body back to life, but it is a greater miracle to bring a soul dead in sin back to life. My friends have you ever felt the touch of this Jesus? Oh! that we all might feel His touch, that we might look and be healed and live."

"Miracles are very often thought of, both by those who believe in them and by those who do not, as events, or purported events, that contradict the laws of nature and that therefore cannot be explained by science or reason. But this is not at all what the Bible means by a miracle, as any Biblical scholar will tell you. “The laws of nature” is a modern scientific concept. The Bible knows nothing about nature, let alone the laws of nature."

"That miracles are things in themselves possible, must be allowed so long as it is evident that there is in nature a power equal to the working of them. And certainly the power, principle, or being, by whatever name it be denominated, which produced the universe, and established the laws of it, is fully equal to any occasional departures from them. The object and use of those miracles on which the christian religion is founded, is also maintained to be consonant to the object and use of the general system of nature, viz. the production of happiness. We have nothing, therefore to do, but to examine, by the known rules of estimating the value of testimony whether there be reason to think that such miracles have been wrought, or whether the evidence of Christianity, or of the christian history, does not stand upon as good ground as that of any other history whatever."

"When I look to my guiltiness, I see that my salvation is one of our Saviour's greatest miracles, either in heaven or earth."

"This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary... you can elect what you want to take at a given time. The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite... This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way: Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God."

"Great floods have flown From simple sources, and great seas have dried When miracles have by the greatest been denied."

"It must be so; for miracles are ceased And therefore we must needs admit the means How things are perfected."

"As nothing happens in nature which does not follow from her laws, and as her laws embrace everything conceived by the Divine intellect, and lastly, as nature preserves a fixed and immutable order; it most clearly follows that miracles are only intelligible as in relation to human opinions, and merely mean events of which the natural cause cannot be explained by a reference to any ordinary occurrence, either by us, or at any rate, by the writer and narrator of the miracle. ...Since miracles were wrought according to the understanding of the masses, who are wholly ignorant of the workings of nature, it is certain that the ancients took for a miracle whatever they could not explain by the method adopted by the unlearned in such cases, namely, an appeal to the memory, a recalling of something similar, which is ordinarily regarded without wonder; for most people think they sufficiently understand a thing when they have ceased to wonder at it. The ancients, then, and indeed most men up to the present day, had no other criterion for a miracle; hence we cannot doubt that many things are narrated in Scripture as miracles of which the causes could easily be explained by reference to ascertained workings of nature."

"All the events narrated in Scripture came to pass naturally, and are referred directly to God because Scripture, as we have shown, does not aim at explaining things by their natural causes, but only at narrating what appeals to the popular imagination, and doing so in the manner best calculated to excite wonder, and consequently to impress the minds of the masses with devotion."

"I’ve always tried to be a rational man. I don’t have much use for the idea of miracles. Things are what they are, that’s all."

"Mohammed did not claim the power of working miracles. The Koran itself, he said, was a miracle sufficient to convince the most stubborn."

"Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from, The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer, This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds."

"The narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels."

"Why, who makes much of a miracle? As to me I know of nothing else but miracles."

"The wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright, Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place."

"To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, Every foot of the interior swarms with the same. To me the sea is a continual miracle, The fishes that swim — the rocks — the motion of the waves — the ships with men in them, What stranger miracles are there?"

"Miracles in mysticism don't occupy such an important place. It's metaphor, for the peasants, for the crowds, to impress people. What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It's close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically. You plunge into it. Philosophy is a slow process of logic and logical discourse: A bringing B bringing C and so forth. In mysticism you can jump from A to Z. But the ultimate objective is the same. It's knowledge. It's truth."

"Miracles are magic processed by faith and a lack of a scientific imagination."

"What is a miracle?—'Tis a reproach, 'Tis an implicit satire on mankind; And while it satisfies, it censures too."

"Thou water turn'st to wine, fair friend of life; Thy foe, to cross the sweet arts of Thy reign, Distils from thence the tears of wrath and strife, And so turns wine to water back again."

"When Christ at Cana's feast by pow'r divine, Inspir'd cold water, with the warmth of wine, See! cry'd they while, in red'ning tide, it gush'd, The bashful stream hath seen its God and blush'd."

"Accept a miracle; instead of wit,— See two dull lines by Stanhope's pencil writ."

"The water owns a power Divine, And conscious blushes into wine; Its very nature changed displays The power Divine that it obeys."

"Philosophy … consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems."

"Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case."

"If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought’s powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence."

"As solid citizens, philosophers ally themselves in practice with the powers they condemn in theory."

"Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite."

"Therefore, the seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."

"(Philosophy is)"

"An art, which has an aim to achieve the beauty, is called a philosophy or in the absolute sense it is named wisdom."

"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned."

"You cannot be a philosopher. You cannot be one because you are a believer. A Catholic cannot be a philosopher'. So said Ugo Spirito to me one day. And this was the claim of most of the most influential philosophical movements of the century just ended. It was the presumption of those idealists for whom philosophy had among its tasks that of bringing to rational awareness contents embedded in “religious myths”."

"Dario Antiseri, Cristiano perché relativista, relativista perché cristiano. Per un razionalismo della contingenza, Rubbettino Editore, Soveria Mannelli, 2003"

"If … the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be. Kant—in this respect almost alone among the philosophers—was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications."

"It is necessary therefore that the person who is to study, with any tolerable chance of profit, the principles of nobleness and justice and politics generally, should have received a good moral training. For our data here are moral judgments, and if a man knows what it is right to do, he does not require a formal reason. And a person that has been thus trained, either possesses these first principles already, or can easily acquire them. As for him who neither possesses nor can acquire them, let him take to heart the words of Hesiod:"

"‘He is the best of all who thinks for himself in all things. He, too, is good who takes advice from a wiser (person). But he who neither thinks for himself, nor lays to heart another's wisdom, this is a useless man.’"

"Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all."

"The philosopher as an analyst is not concerned with the physical properties of things, but only with the way in which we speak about them."

"The philosopher is not someone who has thought instead of us but rather someone who makes us think."

"A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion."

"Philosophy only is the true one which reproduces most faithfully the statements of nature, and is written down, as it were, from nature's dictation, so that it is nothing but a copy and a reflection of nature, and adds nothing of its own, but is merely a repetition and echo."

"Philosophy, being nothing but the study of wisdom and truth..."

"Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing."

"The whole question of phenomena rests on the correct comprehension of old philosophies. Whither, then, should we turn, in our perplexity, but to the ancient sages, since, on the pretext of superstition, we are refused an explanation by the modern? Let us ask them what they know of genuine science and religion; not in the matter of mere details, but in all the broad conception of these twin truths — so strong in their unity, so weak when divided. Besides, we may find our profit in comparing this boasted modern science with ancient ignorance; this improved modern theology with the "Secret doctrines" of the ancient universal religion. Perhaps we may thus discover a neutral ground whence we can reach and profit by both. It is the Platonic philosophy, the most elaborate compend of the abstruse systems of old India, that can alone afford us this middle ground."

"Basing all his doctrines upon the presence of the Supreme Mind, Plato taught that the nous, spirit, or rational soul of man, being “ generated by the Divine Father,” possessed a nature kindred, or even homogeneous, with the Divinity, and was capable of beholding the eternal realities. This faculty of contemplating reality in a direct and immediate manner belongs to God alone j the aspiration for this knowledge constitutes what is really meant by philosophy—the love of wisdom. The love of truth is inherently the love of good ; and so predominating over every desire of the soul, purifying it and assimilating it to the divine, thus governing every act of the individual, it raises man to a participation and communion with Divinity, and restores him to the likeness of God.“ This flight,” says Plato in the Theeetetus, “ consists in becoming like God, and this assimilation is the becoming just and holy with wisdom.”"

"There was not a philosopher of any notoriety who did not hold to this doctrine of metempsychosis, as taught by the Brahmans, Buddhists, and later by the Pythagoreans, in its esoteric sense, whether he expressed it more or less intelligibly. Origen and Clemens Alexandrinus, Synesius and Chalcidius, all believed in it; and the Gnostics, who are unhesitatingly proclaimed by history as a body of the most refined, learned, and enlightened men, were all believers in metempsychosis. Socrates entertained opinions identical with those of Pythagoras; and both, as the penalty of their divine philosophy, were put to a violent death. The rabble has been the same in all ages. Materialism has been, and will ever be blind to spiritual truths. These philosophers held, with the Hindus, that God had infused into matter a portion of his own Divine Spirit, which animates and moves every particle."

"The philosopher wants to know things as they are. He loves the truth. That is an intellectual virtue. He does not love to tell the truth. That is a moral virtue. Presumably he would prefer not to practice deception; but if it is a condition of his survival, he has no objection to it. The hopes of changing mankind almost always end up in changing not mankind but one’s thought."

"Art shows how it loves, philosophy what it loves; mysticism knows only that it loves."

"Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it … or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings—that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide."

"Sublime Philosophy! Thou art the patriarch’s ladder, reaching heaven; And bright with beckoning angels—but alas! We see thee, like the patriarch, but in dreams, By the first step, dull slumbering on the earth."

"Beside, he was a shrewd philosopher, And had read ev’ry text and gloss over Whate’er the crabbed’st author hath, He understood b’ implicit faith."

"Before Philosophy can teach by Experience, the Philosophy has to be in readiness, the Experience must be gathered and intelligibly recorded."

"Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer."

"In Hindustan, as in England, there are doctrines for the learned, and dogmas for the unlearned; strong meat for men & milk for babes; facts for the few, & fictions for the many, realities for the wise, and romances for the simple; esoteric truth for the philosopher, & exoteric fable for the fool."

"O vitæ philosophia dux! O virtutis indagatrix, expultrixque vitiorum! Quid non modo nos, sed omnino vita hominum sine et esse potuisset? Tu urbes peperisti; tu dissipatos homines in societatum vitæ convocasti."

"The name philosopher, which meant originally 'lover of wisdom,' has come in some strange way to mean a man who thinks it is his business to explain everything in a certain number of large books. It will be found, I think, that in proportion to his colossal ignorance is the perfection and symmetry of the system which he sets up; because it is so much easier to put an empty room tidy than a full one."

"In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission."

"There exists a definite misunderstanding between scientists and philosophers; a misunderstanding which might easily have been avoided had philosophers possessed a proper realisation of their inevitable limitations when discussing scientific matters."

"The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought. It has played the represser’s role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger, and so-and-so’s book about them? A formidable school of intimidation which manufactures specialists in thought—but which also makes those who stay outside conform all the more to this specialism which they despise. An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking."

"The first step towards philosophy is incredulity."

"The only justification for our concepts and system of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy. I am convinced that the philosophers have had a harmful effect upon the progress of scientific thinking in removing certain fundamental concepts from the domain of empiricism, where they are under our control, to the intangible heights of the a priori. For even if it should appear that the universe of ideas cannot be deduced from experience by logical means, but is, in a sense, a creation of the human mind, without which no science is possible, nevertheless this universe of ideas is just as little independent of the nature of our experiences as clothes are of the form of the human body. This is particularly true of our concepts of time and space, which physicists have been obliged by the facts to bring down from the Olympus of the a priori in order to adjust them and put them in a servicable condition."

"The Beginning of Philosophy is a Consciousness of your own Weakness and inability in necessary things."

"Luxurious food and drinks, in no way protect you from harm. Wealth beyond what is natural, is no more use than an overflowing container. Real value is not generated by theaters, and baths, perfumes or ointments, but by philosophy."

"Philosophy instructs us to pay homage to the gods, not through hope or fear, but from veneration of Their superior nature. It moreover enables us to conquer the fear of death, by teaching us that it is no proper object of terror; since, whilst we are, death is not, and when death arrives, we are not: so that it neither concerns the living nor the dead."

"Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more. Therefore, both old and young alike ought to seek wisdom, the former in order that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has been, and the latter in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which are to come. So we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed towards attaining it."

"When I arrived at college, I immediately took philosophy... Nothing was ever answered. I decided that "Why" questions are simply too deep to be answered with a frontal attack, using the sloppy weapon of human language."

"To theology, … only what it holds sacred is true, whereas to philosophy, only what holds true is sacred."

"The question of whether or not, when you see something, you see only the light or you see the thing you're looking at, is one of those dopey philosophical things that an ordinary person has no difficulty with. Even the most profound philosopher, when sitting, eating his dinner, hasn't any difficulty in making out that what he looks at perhaps might be only the light from the steak, but it still implies the existence of the steak, which he is able to lift by the fork to his mouth. The philosophers that were unable to make that analysis and that idea, have fallen by the wayside through hunger!"

"Every other art,—as poetry, music, painting,—may be practised without the process showing forth the rules according to which it is conducted;—but in the self-cognizant art of the philosopher, no step can be taken without declaring the grounds upon which it proceeds."

"Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve."

"There is hardly a philosophy which has not invoked something like the will or desire to know, the love of truth, etcetera. But, in truth, very few philosophers—apart, perhaps, from Spinoza and Schopenhauer—have accorded it more than a marginal status; as if there was no need for philosophy to say first of all what the name that it bears actually refers to. As if placing at the head of its discourse the desire to know, which it repeats in its name, was enough to justify its own existence and show—at a stroke—that it is necessary and natural: All men desire to know. Who, then, is not a philosopher, and how could philosophy not be the most necessary thing in the world?"

"Many philosophers and many departments simply ignore arguments for greater diversity; others respond with arguments for Eurocentrism that we and many others have refuted elsewhere. The profession as a whole remains resolutely Eurocentric. It therefore seems futile to rehearse arguments for greater diversity one more time, however compelling we find them.Instead, we ask those who sincerely believe that it does make sense to organize our discipline entirely around European and American figures and texts to pursue this agenda with honesty and openness. We therefore suggest that any department that regularly offers courses only on Western philosophy should rename itself “Department of European and American Philosophy.”"

"A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject."

"Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That of which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak."

"Philosophy always buries its undertakers."

"This same philosophy is a good horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey."

"The true philosophy is rhetoric, and the true rhetoric is philosophy, a philosophy which does not need an “external” rhetoric to convince, and a rhetoric that does not need an “external” content of verity."

"We may get some idea of the change in perspective that may occur in our reading and interpretation of the philosophical works of antiquity when we consider them from the point of view of the practice of spiritual exercises. Philosophy then appears in its original aspect: not as a theoretical construct, but as a method for training people to live and to look at the world in a new way. It is an attempt to transform mankind. Contemporary historians of philosophy are today scarcely inclined to pay attention to this aspect, although it is an essential one. The reason for this is that, in conformity with a tradition inherited from the Middle Ages … they consider philosophy to be purely abstract-theoretical activity."

"With the advent of medieval Scholasticism, … we find a clear distinction between theologia and philosophia. Theology became conscious of its autonomy qua supreme science, which philosophy was emptied of its spiritual exercises, which, from now on, were relegated to Christian mysticism and ethics. Reduced to the rank of a “handmaid of theology,” philosophy’s role was henceforth to furnish theology with conceptual—and hence purely theoretical—material. When, in the modern age, philosophy regained its autonomy, it still retained many features inherited from this medieval conception. In particular, it maintained its purely theoretical character, which even evolved in the direction of a more and more thorough systemization. Not until Nietzsche, Bergson, and existentialism does philosophy consciously return to being a concrete attitude, a way of life and of seeing the world."

"Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists."

"A thirsty ambition for truth and virtue, and a frenzy to conquer all lies and vices which are not recognized as such nor desire to be; herein consists the heroic spirit of the philosopher."

"'You only think you are barnpots,' shouted angry farmers from the meadows. 'Shut that row up! You're frightening the chickens, you lot and your bloody philosophy. You can't eat philosophy can you? Where would you be if us farmers went round spouting statements like that, eh? Dead, that's where you'd be! Because there'd be naff all to eat!"

"Philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event."

"Philosophy is that which grasps its own era in thought."

"Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy."

"In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the intellectual world."

"Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology."

"I found a certain Boldness of Temper, growing in me, which was not enclin'd to submit to any Authority in these Subjects, but led me to seek out some new Medium, by which Truth might be establisht. After much Study, & Reflection on this, at last, when I was about 18 Years of Age, there seem'd to be open'd up to me a new Scene of Thought, which transported me beyond Measure, & made me, with an Ardor natural to young men, throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it."

"Pythagoras is said to have been the first to call himself a philosopher, a word which heretofore had not been an appellation, but a description. He likened the entrance of men into the present life to the progression of a crowd to some public spectacle. There assemble men of all descriptions and views. One hastens to sell his wares for money and gain; another exhibits his bodily strength for renown; but the most liberal assemble to observe the landscape, the beautiful works of art, the specimens of valor, and the customary literary productions. So also in the present life men of manifold pursuits are assembled. Some are incensed by the desire of riches and luxury; others by the love of power and dominion, or by insane ambition for glory. But the purest and most genuine character is that of the man who devotes himself to the contemplation of the most beautiful things; and he may properly be called a philosopher."

"Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs; and lucky it is if the passion be not something as petty as a love of personal conquest over the philosopher across the way."

"I confess to a certain tremor at the audacity of the enterprise which I am about to begin. For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos. ...I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philosophy... but they soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only partially encouraging. So my enterprise is a bold one. The founder of pragmatism... gave... lectures... with that very word in its title,—flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness! None of us... understood all that he said—yet here I stand making a very similar venture. ...There is... a curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even though neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness."

"The Greek word for philosopher (philosophos) connotes a distinction from sophos. It signifies the lover of wisdom (knowledge) as distinguished from him who considers himself wise in the possession of knowledge. This meaning of the word still endures: the essence of philosophy is not the possession of the truth but the search for truth. … Philosophy means to be on the way. Its questions are more essential than its answers, and every answer becomes a new question."

"To philosophise is to learn to die – philosophising is a soaring up to the Godhead – the knowledge of Being as Being."

"Physics and philosophy are at most a few thousand years old, but probably have lives of thousands of millions of years stretching away in front of them. They are only just beginning to get under way."

"Born and nurtured when the human being first asked questions about the reason for things and their purpose, philosophy shows in different modes and forms that the desire for truth is part of human nature itself."

"the human being is by nature a philosopher"

"philosophy must obey its own rules and be based upon its own principles; truth, however, can only be one."

"Empirical popular knowledge, usually termed ‘common sense’, had been dismissed contemptuously by Bertrand Russell as ‘the metaphysics of savages’. But if academic philosophers thought the world was peopled by fools, most made little or no attempt to enlighten them on the great issues of the day, and even Russell, who wrote on such matters, drew an absolute distinction between his popular journalism and his ‘serious’ work. The negative and destructive nature of twentieth-century philosophy, its obsession with the inadequacies and failures of language, above all its failure to address itself to the immense problems confronting humanity, was a source of shame to the few who tried to grapple with them, notably Karl Popper: ‘I cannot say that I am proud of being called a philosopher,’ he wrote."

"Too much philosophy makes men mad."

"If it does not upset, it is not philosophy."

"Much can be left unstated. But if nothing is discredited, it is not philosophy."

"What I really need is to get clear about what I am to do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find my purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. Of what use would it be to me to discover a so-called objective truth, to work through the philosophical systems so that I could, if asked, make critical judgments about them, could point out the fallacies in each system; of what use would it be to me to be able to develop a theory of the state, getting details from various sources and combining them into a whole, and constructing a world I did not live in but merely held up for others to see."

"Philosophy is life's dry-nurse, who can take care of us -- but not suckle us."

"It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards."

"The spheres with which philosophy properly has to deal, the spheres proper to thought, are logic, nature, and history. Here necessity rules and therefore mediation has its validity. That this is true of logic and nature, no one will deny, but with history there is a difficulty, for here, it is said, freedom prevails. But I think that history is incorrectly interpreted and that the difficulty arises from the following: History, namely, is more than a product of the free actions of free individuals. The individual acts, but his action enters into the order of things that maintains the whole of existence. What is going to come of his action, one who acts does not really know. But this higher order of things that digests, so to speak, the free actions and works them together in its eternal laws is necessity, and this necessity is the movement of world history; it is therefore quite proper for philosophy to use mediation-that is, relative mediation. If I am contemplating a world-historical individuality, I can then distinguish between the deeds of which Scripture says “they follow him” and the deeds by which he belongs to history. Philosophy has nothing to do with what could be called the inner deed, but the inner deed is the true life of freedom. Philosophy considers the external deed, yet in turn it does not see this as isolated but sees it as assimilated into and transformed in the world-historical process. This process is the proper subject for philosophy and it considers this under the category of necessity. Therefore it reject the reflection that wants to point out that everything could be otherwise; it views world-history in such a way that there is no question of an either/or."

"If philosophy among other vagaries were also to have the notion that it could occur to a man to act in accordance with its teaching, one might make out of that a queer comedy."

"The sum of his doctrine concerning philosophy, in general, is this: Philosophy is the exercise of reason in the pursuit and attainment of a happy life; whence it follows, that those studies which conduce neither to the acquisition nor the enjoyment of happiness are to be dismissed as of no value. The end of all speculation ought to be, to enable men to judge with certainty what is to be chosen, and what to be avoided, to preserve themselves free from pain, and to secure health of body, and tranquillity of mind. True philosophy is so useful to every man, that the young should apply to it without delay, and the old should never be weary of the pursuit; for no man is either too young or too old to correct and improve his mind, and to study the art of happiness. Happy are they who possess by nature a free and vigorous intellect, and who are born in a country where they can prosecute their inquiries without restraint: for it is philosophy alone which raises a man above vain fears and base passions, and gives him the perfect command of himself."

"As nothing ought to be dearer to a philosopher than truth, he should, pursue it by the most direct means, devising no actions himself, nor suffering himself to be imposed upon by the fictions of others, neither poets, orators, nor logicians, making no other use of the rules of rhetoric or grammar, than to enable him to speak or write with accuracy and perspicuity, and always preferring a plain and simple to an ornamented style. Whilst some doubt of everything, and others profess to acknowledge everything, a wise man will embrace such tenets, and only such as are built upon experience, or upon certain and indisputable axioms."

"Philosophy is any culture’s pole of maximum abstraction, or intrinsically experimental intelligence, expressing the liberation of cognitive capabilities from immediate practical application, and their testing against ‘ultimate’ problems at the horizon of understanding."

"Philosophy, like charity, begins at home ; but also, like charity, I should wish it to extend, and become the more beneficial the more it expands."

"Never was there a greater need for the diffusion of knowledge, for in the present ignorance of men there is a very real and imminent danger. We have in the immediate future the possibility of serious struggle; we have all the elements of a possible social upheaval, and we have no religion with sufficient hold upon the people to check what may develop into a wild and dangerous movement. As yet philosophy is the study of the very few only, and the science which has done so much for us, and has achieved so many triumphs, cannot stay the danger which threatens us. The only thing that can prevent it is the diffusion of knowledge, so that men shall understand what is really best for them and shall realize that nothing can ever be good for one which is against the interests of the whole. p. 333"

"Philosophy is the misuse of a terminology which was invented for just this purpose."

"We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves. Even if my philosophy does not extend to discovering anything new, it does nevertheless possess the courage to regard as questionable what has long been thought true."

"Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner."

"Regard for the true endeavor of philosophy, that of guiding into one common stream the many rills of knowledge, will not be found wanting in my work, although it takes a determined stand against the encroachments of metaphysical methods."

"You feared the force of custom, the ascendancy of authority, the illusions of the imagination. None of these things are left; there are no more customs, there are no more masters, each man's mind is his own. Philosophy having corroded the cement that united men, there are no longer any moral bonds."

"I believe that in actual fact philosophy ranks before and above the natural sciences and that all method and exactness serve its intuitions and its intellectual and historical will. In the last analysis it is always a matter of the quod erat demonstrandum. Scientific freedom from assumptions is or should be a moral fact. But intellectually it is, as Freud points out, probably an illusion. One might strain the point and say that science has never made a discovery without being authorized and encouraged by philosophy."

"The philosopher … subjects experience to his critical judgment, and this contains a value judgment—namely, that freedom from toil is preferable to toil, and an intelligent life is preferable to a stupid life. It so happened that philosophy was born with these values. Scientific thought had to break this union of value judgment and analysis, for it became increasingly clear that the philosophic values did not guide the organisation of society."

"Philosophy is the science by which the natural light of reason studies the first causes or highest principles of all things – is, in other words, the science of things in their first causes, in so far as these belong to the natural order."

"Half of good philosophy is good grammar."

"Philosophy is an interpretation of the world in order to change it."

"Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern."

"Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love."

"Theology is to-day recognised to be the instrument of myth, philosophy to be the instrument of science."

"What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement."

"Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution."

"How charming is divine philosophy! Not harsh, and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo’s lute, And a perpetual feast of nectar’d sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns."

"That stone, Philosophers in vain so long have sought."

"Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding."

"The main concern of philosophy is to question and understand very common ideas that all of us use every day without thinking about them. A historian may ask what happened at some time in the past, but a philosopher will ask, "What is time?" A mathematician may investigate the relations among numbers, but a philosopher will ask, "What is a number?" A physicist will ask what atoms are made of or what explains gravity, but a philosopher will ask how we can know there is anything outside of our own minds. A psychologist may investigate how children learn a language, but a philosopher will ask, "What makes a word mean anything?" Anyone can ask whether it's wrong to sneak into a movie without paying, but a philosopher will ask, "What makes an action right or wrong?""

"For the best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be, first diligently to investigate the properties of things and establish them by experiment, and then later seek hypotheses to explain them. For hypotheses ought to be fitted merely to explain the properties of things and not to predetermine them [the hypotheses] except so far as they can be an aid to experiments. If any one offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see how anything certain can be determined in any science; for it is always possible to contrive hypotheses, one after another, which are found rich in new tribulations. Wherefore I judged that one should abstain from considering hypotheses as from a fallacious argument, and that the force of their argument must be removed, that one may arrive at a maturer and more general explanation."

"Jetzt wage ich es, der Weisheit selber nachzugehen und selber Philosoph zu sein; früher verehrte ich die Philosophen."

"Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force it way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart."

"[Philosophers] are not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic...; while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of “inspiration”—most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract—that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact."

"To grasp the limits of reason – only this is truly philosophy."

"What does a philosopher demand of himself, first and last? To overcome his time in himself, to become “timeless.”"

"Science rushes headlong, without selectivity, without “taste,” at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost. Philosophical thinking, on the other hand, is ever on the scent of those things which are most worth knowing, the great and the important insights."

"The philosopher must be above all a free man, and not a slave of the passions."

"The evaluation of one's own social circumstance is part of the analysis of facts and events, and this kind of evaluation is, I feel, as good a starting point of the inquiry into the relations between philosophy and society as any other. Philosophy, in understanding human society, call for an analysis of facts and events, and an attempt to see how they fit into human life, and so how they make up human experience. In this way, philosophy, like history, can come to enrich, indeed to define, the experience of man."

"The possibility of all philosophy ... namely, that the intelligence, by affecting itself, gives itself a movement in accordance with its own law—that is, gives itself a form of activity all its own."

"Philosophy can bake no bread; but she can procure for us God, Freedom, Immortality. Which, then, is more practical, Philosophy or Economy?"

"Se moquer de la philosophie c’est vraiment philosophe."

"The realist, then, would seek in behalf of philosophy the same renunciation the same rigour of procedure, that has been achieved in science. This does not mean that he would reduce philosophy to natural or physical science. He recognizes that the philosopher has undertaken certain peculiar problems, and that he must apply himself to these, with whatever method he may find it necessary to employ. It remains the business of the philosopher to attempt a wide synoptic survey of the world, to raise underlying and ulterior questions, and in particular to examine the cognitive and moral processes. And it is quite true that for the present no technique at all comparable with that of the exact sciences is to be expected. But where such technique is attainable, as for example in symbolic logic, the realist welcomes it. And for the rest he limits himself to a more modest aspiration. He hopes that philosophers may come like scientists to speak a common language, to formulate common problems and to appeal to a common realm of fact for their resolution. Above all he desires to get rid of the philosophical monologue, and of the lyric and impressionistic mode of philosophizing. And in all this he is prompted not by the will to destroy but by the hope that philosophy is a kind of knowledge, and neither a song nor a prayer nor a dream. He proposes, therefore, to rely less on inspiration and more on observation and analysis. He conceives his function to be in the last analysis the same as that of the scientist. There is a world out yonder more or less shrouded in darkness, and it is important, if possible, to light it up. But instead of, like the scientist, focussing the mind's rays and throwing this or that portion of the world into brilliant relief, he attempts to bring to light the outlines and contour of the whole, realizing too well that in diffusing so widely what little light he has, he will provide only a very dim illumination."

"Philosophia non sapientiam, sed amorem sapientie pollicetur."

"Modo verus amor sit et vera quam ames sapientia, philosophus verus eris."

"I address all these complaints ... against the philosophers who believe and assert that philosophy should not be pursued because no monetary value or reward is assigned it, unmindful that by this sign they disqualify themselves as philosophers. Since their whole life is concentrated on gain and ambition, they never embrace the knowledge of the truth for its own sake."

"I have never philosophized save for the sake of philosophy, nor have I ever desired or hoped to secure from my studies and my laborious researches any profit or fruit save cultivation of mind and knowledge of the truth."

"Philosophy is the acquisition of knowledge."

"Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder."

"Those who belong to this small class have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and have also seen and been satisfied of the madness of the multitude, and known that there is no one who ever acts honestly in the administration of States, nor any helper who will save any one who maintains the cause of the just. Such a saviour would be like a man who has fallen among wild beasts—unable to join in the wickedness of his fellows, neither would he be able alone to resist all their fierce natures, and therefore he would be of no use to the State or to his friends, and would have to throw away his life before he had done any good to himself or others. And he reflects upon all this, and holds his peace, and does his own business. He is like one who retires under the shelter of a wall in the storm of dust and sleet which the driving wind hurries along; and when he sees the rest of mankind full of wickedness, he is content if only he can live his own life and be pure from evil or unrighteousness, and depart in peace and good will, with bright hopes."

"The permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless skepticism."

"In the realm of philosophy, ... it is extraordinary how much weight is attached to fashion in a province where the mind ought to be free and independent, anxious only to arrive at the truth, and bowing to the authority of none but proved masters."

"Most definitions of philosophy are fairly controversial, particularly if they aim to be at all interesting or profound. That is partly because what has been called philosophy has changed radically in scope in the course of history, with many inquiries that were originally part of it having detached themselves from it. The shortest definition, and it is quite a good one, is that philosophy is thinking about thinking. That brings out the generally second-order character of the subject, as reflective thought about particular kinds of thinking — formation of beliefs, claims to knowledge — about the world or large parts of it. A more detailed, but still uncontroversial comprehensive, definition is that philosophy is rationally critical thinking, of a more or less systematic kind about the general nature of the world (metaphysics or theory of existence), the justification of belief (epistemology or theory of knowledge), and the conduct of life (ethics or theory of value). Each of these three elements..."

"Well, for me, it's clarification of the nature of the world, the nature of reality. I seek the same satisfaction that one looks for in science in general, in theoretical science."

"Philosophy is not to relieve one of decisions, but to confront him with decisions. It is to make life not easy but, on the contrary, problematical."

"In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in order to make choices, he must define a code of values; in order to define a code of values, he must know what he is and where he is – i.e. he must know his own nature (including his means of knowledge) and the nature of the universe in which he acts – i.e. he needs metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, which means: philosophy. He cannot escape from this need; his only alternative is whether the philosophy guiding him is to be chosen by his mind or by chance."

"'Philosophy' is a word which has been used in many ways, some wider, some narrower. I propose to use it in a very wide sense, which I will now try to explain."

"Tigers are more beautiful than sheep, but we prefer them behind bars."

"[On the teaching of philosophy in secondary schools] In France and Spain, where it has been almost eliminated from secondary schools, they have regretted it. In Germany, there is no possibility of an intermediate level of knowledge. A philosopher like Gadamer is much better understood in Italy than in Germany. He once told me that when he came here he felt like he was in a sanctuary: all those young people who came to hear him had tools of understanding that no other country had."

"Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business."

"Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life."

"Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind is also rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good."

"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."

"When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid."

"Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge—so I should contend—belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries."

"Science is what we know, and philosophy is what we don't know."

"Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars."

"Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative."

"The philosopher places himself at the summit of thought; from there he views what the world has been and what it must become. He is not just an observer, he is an actor; he is an actor of the highest kind in a moral world because it is his opinion of what the world must become that regulates society."

"Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained."

"Expect nothing more from philosophy than a voice, language and grammar of the instinct for Godliness that lies at its origin, and, essentially, is philosophy itself."

"Über keinen Gegenstand philosophieren sie seltner als über die Philosophie."

"Philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem."

"Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist."

"A man becomes a philosopher by reason of a certain perplexity, from which he seeks to free himself."

"To be a philosopher, that is to say, a lover of wisdom (for wisdom is nothing but truth), it is not enough for a man to love truth, in so far as it is compatible with his own interest, with the will of his superiors, with the dogmas of the church, or with the prejudices and tastes of his contemporaries; so long as he rests content with this position, he is only a φίλαυτος [lover of self], not a φιλόσοφος [lover of wisdom]. For this title of honor is well and wisely conceived precisely by its stating that one should love the truth earnestly and with one’s whole heart, and thus unconditionally and unreservedly, above all else, and, if need be, in defiance of all else. Now the reason for this is the one previously stated that the intellect has become free, and in this state it does not even know or understand any other interest than that of truth."

"University professors, restricted in this way, are quite happy about the matter, for their real concern is to earn with credit an honest livelihood for themselves and also for their wives and children and moreover to enjoy a certain prestige in the eyes of the public. On the other hand, the deeply stirred mind of the real philosopher, whose whole concern in to look for the key to our existence, as mysterious as it is precarious, is regarded by them as something mythological, if indeed the man so affected does not even appear to them to be obsessed by a monomania, should he ever be met with among them. For that a man could really be in dead earnest about philosophy does not as a rule occur to anyone, least of all to a lecturer thereon."

"The philosophical author is the leader, his reader the wanderer. If they are to arrive together, they must above all start out together; in other words, the author must take up his reader at a standpoint which they undoubtedly have in common. This, however, can be none other than that of empirical consciousness that is common to us all. Let him, therefore, take him firmly by the hand and see how high above the clouds he can reach, step by step on the mountain path."

"To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world, and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason, this and nothing else is philosophy."

"It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles’ Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God’s sake, not to inquire further."

"Philosophy is nothing but Discretion."

"Philosophy is no trick to catch the public; it is not devised for show. It is a matter, not of words, but of facts. It is not pursued in order that the day may yield some amusement before it is spent, or that our leisure may be relieved of a tedium that irks us. It molds and constructs the soul; it orders our life, guides our conduct, shows us what we should do and what we should leave undone; it sits at the helm and directs our course as we waver amid uncertainties. Without it, no one can live fearlessly or in peace of mind. Countless things that happen every hour call for advice; and such advice is to be sought in philosophy."

"It is probable that those who seek after anything whatever, will either find it as they continue the search, will deny that it can be found and confess it to be out of reach, or will go on seeking it. Some have said, accordingly, in regard to the things sought in philosophy, that they have found the truth, while others have declared it impossible to find, and still others continue to seek it. Those who think that they have found it are those who are especially called Dogmatics, as for example, the Schools of Aristotle and Epicurus, the Stoics and some others. Those who have declared it impossible to find are Clitomachus, Carneades, with their respective followers, and other Academicians. Those who still seek it are the Sceptics. It appears therefore, reasonable to conclude that the three principal kinds of philosophy are the Dogmatic, the Academic, and the Sceptic."

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

"Adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy."

"The philosopher is Nature’s pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer."

"There is a school of Philosophy still in existence of which modern culture has lost sight. Glimpses of it are discernible in the ancient philosophies with which all educated men are familiar, but these are hardly more intelligible than fragments of forgotten sculpture,-less so, for we comprehend the human form, and can give imaginary limbs to a torso; but we can give no imaginary meaning to the truth coming down to us from Plato or Pythagoras, pointing, for those who hold the clue to their significance, to the secret knowledge of the ancient world. Side lights, nevertheless, may enable us to decipher such language, and a very rich intellectual reward offers itself to persons who are willing to attempt the investigation."

"For, strange as the statement will appear at first sight, modern metaphysics, and to a large extent modern physical science, have been groping for centuries blindly after knowledge which occult philosophy has enjoyed in full measure all the while. Owing to a train of fortunate circumstances, I have come to know that this is the case; I have come into some contact with persons who are heirs of a greater knowledge concerning the mysteries of Nature and humanity than modern culture has yet evolved; and my present wish is to sketch the outlines of this knowledge, to record with exactitude the experimental proofs I have obtained that occult science invest its adepts with a control of natural forces superior to that enjoyed by physicists of the ordinary type, and the grounds there are for bestowing the most respectful consideration on the theories entertained by occult science concerning the constitution and destinies of the human soul."

"People in the present day will be slow to believe that any knowledge worth considering can be found outside the bright focus of Western culture. Modern science has accomplished grand results by the open method of investigation, and is very impatient of the theory that persons who ever attained to real knowledge, either in sciences or metaphysics, could have been content to hide their light under a bushel. So the tendency has been to conceive that occult philosophers of old- Egyptian priests, Chaldean Magi, Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-Platonists, and the rest-who kept their knowledge secret, must have adopted that policy to conceal the fact that they knew very little. Mystery can only have been loved by charlatans who wished to mystify. The conclusion is pardonable from the modern point of view, but it has given rise to an impression in the popular mind that the ancient mystics have actually been turned inside out, and found to know very little. This impression is absolutely erroneous."

"It was pretty cool to know that someone else was wondering about all the shit I was wondering about even two thousand years ago—even though it made me a bit sad to realize that meant nobody had figured anything out in all of that time."

"It is as absurd to expect members of philosophy departments to be philosophers as it is to expect members of art departments to be artists."

"Men are constantly attracted and deluded by two opposite charms: the charm of competence which is engendered by mathematics and everything akin to mathematics, and the charm of humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences. Philosophy is characterized by the gentle, if firm, refusal to succumb to either charm."

"This is not philosophy, this is reality. Will you please keep in mind what’s going on!"

"A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal, immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it."

"There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men."

"A philosopher who had made philosophy his speciality, who had first murdered his humanity and then buried it in his philosophy, …"

"Philosophy in the strong, classical sense shares with religion the object, truth, the Absolute in and of itself, and is therefore properly a stripping away, a removal of everything that is relative and accidental, in order to get to the essential. This concerns first and foremost ourselves, according to the precept of the Delphic Apollo: ‘Know thyself’. It is the ‘sculpting of one's own statue’ that Plotinus speaks of, removing the marble that covers it and prevents it from coming to light"

"La clarté est la bonne foi des philosophes."

"The observation and experiments necessary for the pursuit of alchemy did not comport with the Greek idea of philosophy. This is shown by the saying of Socrates, that the nature of external objects could be discovered by thought without observation, and by the renunciation of all natural sciences by the Cynics. This came largely from the fact that they saw in the nature around them the mutable only. Plato separated logic, as the knowledge of the immutable, from physics, the knowledge of the mutable. That which was subject to indefinite change would not repay observing nor recording, therefore they could not conceive of astronomy and physics as serious objects of mental occupation. There was nothing to be learned from fields and trees and stones. One of the philosophers is said to have gone to the length of putting out his eyes, in order that his mind might not be influenced by external objects, but might wholly give itself to pure contemplation. The intellectual power and grasp of these philosophers were wonderful, but faulty and misleading, since the real and practical was left out."

"Contemporary philosophy illustrates Hegel’s dictum that philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, for in our age philosophy yields to the objectifying technical impulse and loses its ancient task of pursuing the Socratic ideal of the wisdom of the examined life."

"The theory of Karma is that we suffer for our good or bad deeds, and the whole scope of philosophy is to approach the glory of man. All the Scriptures sing the glory of man, of the soul, and then, with the same breath, they preach this Karma. A good deed brings such a result, and a bad deed such a result, but, if the soul can be acted upon by a good or a bad deed it amounts to nothing. Bad deeds put a bart to the manifestation of our nature, of the Purusa (soul), and good deeds take the obstacles off, and its glory becomes manifest. But the Purusa itself is never changed. Whatever you do never destroys your own glory, your own nature, because the soul cannot be acted upon by anything, only a veil is spread before it, hiding its perfection. Chapter 4, Sutra 4."

"Philosophy is an activity: it is a way of thinking about certain sorts of question. Its most distinctive feature is its use of logical argument. Philosophers typically deal in arguments: they either invent them, criticize other people’s, or do both. They also analyse and clarify concepts."

"Shouldn't I join the ranks of philosophers and merely make unsubstantiated claims about the wonders of human consciousness? Shouldn't I stop trying to do some science and keep my head down? Indeed not."

"I feel that we are all philosophers, and that those who describe themselves as a philosopher simply do not have a day job to go to."

"When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder, we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason."

"Miracles in mysticism don't occupy such an important place. It's metaphor, for the peasants, for the crowds, to impress people. What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It's close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically. You plunge into it. Philosophy is a slow process of logic and logical discourse: A bringing B bringing C and so forth. In mysticism you can jump from A to Z. But the ultimate objective is the same. It's knowledge. It's truth."

"Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. (4.112)"

"Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it. Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 175"

"People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in. Ch. 9 : Philosophy, p. 185"

"The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question."

"In philosophy the race is to the one who can run slowest—the one who crosses the finish line last."

"Philosophy hasn’t made any progress?—If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?"

"The bosom-weight, your stubborn gift, That no philosophy can lift."

"Why should not grave Philosophy be styled? Herself, a dreamer of a kindred stock, A dreamer, yet more spiritless and dull?"

"When we see a woman bartering beauty for gold, we look upon such a one as no other than a common prostitute; but she who rewards the passion of some worthy youth with it, gains at the same time our approbation and esteem. It is the very same with philosophy: he who sets it forth for public sale, to be disposed of to the highest bidder, is a sophist, a public prostitute."

"What characterizes philosophy is this "step back" from actuality into possibility — the attitude best rendered by Adorno's and Horkheimer's motto quoted by Fredric Jameson: "Not Italy itself is given here, but the proof that it exists.""

"Children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naive and so frighteningly complex. The new men entering life today are as naked and fearless as children; and they, too, like children, like Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, ask “Why?” and “What next?” Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise—because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment, with an excellent toilet, and a well-furnished dogma."

"If the one who offers prayer knew how much divine mercy is descending upon him, he would surely not raise his head from prostration."

"Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer. And let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good."

"But the reason why prayer is necessary for obtaining something from a man is not the same as the reason for its necessity when there is question of obtaining a favor from God. Prayer is addressed to man, first, to lay bare - the desire and the need of the petitioner, and secondly, to incline the mind of him to whom the prayer is addressed to grant the petition. These purposes have no place in the prayer that is sent up to God. When we pray we do not intend to manifest our needs or desires to God, for He knows all things. The Psalmist says to God: “Lord, all my desire is before You” (Psalm 37:10); and in the Gospel we are told: “Your Father knows that you have need of all these things” (Matt. 6:32). Again, the will of God is not influenced by human words to will what He had previously not willed. For, as we read in Numbers 23:19, “God is not a man, that He should lie, nor as the son of man, that He should be changed”; nor is God moved to repentance, as we are assured in 1 Samuel 15:29. Prayer, then, for obtaining something from God is necessary for man on account of the very one who prays, that he may reflect on his shortcomings and may turn his mind to desiring fervently and piously what he hopes to gain by his petition. In this way he is rendered fit to receive the favor. Yet a further difference between the prayer offered to God and that addressed to man is to be marked. Prayer addressed to a man presupposes a certain intimacy that may afford the petitioner an opportunity to present his request. But when we pray to God, the very prayer we send forth makes us intimate with Him, inasmuch as our soul is raised up to God and converses with Him in spiritual affection, and adores Him in spirit and truth. The familiar affection thus experienced in prayer begets an inducement in the petitioner to pray again with yet greater confidence. And so we read in Psalm 16:6: “I have cried to You,” that is, in trusting prayer, “for You, O God, have heard me”; as though, after being admitted to intimacy in the first prayer, the Psalmist cries out with all the greater confidence in the second."

"The most acceptable prayer is the one offered with the utmost spirituality and radiance; its prolongation hath not been and is not beloved by God. The more detached and the purer the prayer, the more acceptable is it in the presence of God."

"Prayer is the spirit speaking truth to Truth."

"Men may spurn our appeals, reject our message, oppose our arguments, despise our persons, but they are helpless against our prayers."

"PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy."

"God shapes the world by prayer."

"Apostolic preaching cannot be carried on unless there be apostolic prayer."

"In prayerful sympathy and love. Hold to the old truth -- double distilled."

"God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face, A gauntlet with a gift in 't."

"Every wish Is like a prayer — with God."

"Hope, he called, belief In God, — work, worship * * * therefore let us pray!"

"There are, O householder, five desirable, pleasant, and agreeable things which are rare in the world. What are those five? They are long life, beauty, happiness, fame and (rebirth in) a heaven. But of those five things, O householder, I do no teach that they are to be obtained by prayer or by vows."

"For a noble disciple, O householder, who wishes to have long life, it is not befitting that he should pray for long life or take delight in so doing. He should rather follow a path of life that is conducive to longevity."

"All my life I have prayed, and all my life I have been refused answer. I scarcely believed in the gods anymore, or if I did, it was only to curse them for their indifference. They betrayed my father, who had served Them loyally all his life. They betrayed my mother, or They were powerless to save her, which was as bad or worse. If a god has come to me, He certainly hasn’t come for me!"

"When the mind is not dissipated upon extraneous things, nor diffused over the world about us through the senses, it withdraws within itself, and of its own accord ascends to the contemplation of God."

"We must resist wandering thoughts in prayer. Raising our hands reminds us that we need to raise up our minds to God, setting aside all irrelevant thoughts."

"Some one will say, Does he not know without a monitor both what our difficulties are, and what is meet for our interest, so that it seems in some measure superfluous to solicit him by our prayers, as if he were winking, or even sleeping, until aroused by the sound of our voice? Those who argue thus attend not to the end for which the Lord taught us to pray. It was not so much for his sake as for ours. ... It is very much for our interest to be constantly supplicating him; first, that our heart may always be inflamed with a serious and ardent desire of seeking, loving and serving him, while we accustom ourselves to have recourse to him as a sacred anchor in every necessity; secondly, that no desires, no longing whatever, of which we are ashamed to make him the witness, may enter our minds, while we learn to place all our wishes in his sight, and thus pour out our heart before him; and, lastly, that we may be prepared to receive all his benefits with true gratitude and thanksgiving, while our prayers remind us that they proceed from his hand."

"Let the first rule of right prayer then be, to have our heart and mind framed as becomes those who are entering into converse with God. This we shall accomplish in regard to the mind, if, laying aside carnal thoughts and cares which might interfere with the direct and pure contemplation of God, it not only be wholly intent on prayer, but also, as far as possible, be borne and raised above itself. ... When I say it must be raised above itself, I mean that it must not bring into the presence of God any of those things which our blind and stupid reason is wont to devise, nor keep itself confined within the little measure of its own vanity, but rise to a purity worthy of God."

"The ceremony of lifting up our hands in prayer is designed to remind us that we are far removed from God, unless our thoughts rise upward."

"Can we suppose anything more hateful or even more execrable to God than this fiction of asking the pardon of sins, while he who asks at the very time either thinks that he is not a sinner, or, at least, is not thinking that he is a sinner; in other words, a fiction by which God is plainly held in derision?"

"He who comes into the presence of God to pray must divest himself of all vainglorious thoughts, lay aside all idea of worth; in short, discard all self- confidence, humbly giving God the whole glory, lest by arrogating any thing, however little, to himself, vain pride cause him to turn away his face."

"As our blessed Lord has required us to pray that his kingdom may come, and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven, it becomes us not only to express our desires of that event by words, but to use every lawful method to spread the knowledge of his name. In order to this, it is necessary that we should become, in some measure acquainted with the religious state of the world; and as this is an object we should be prompted to pursue, not only by the gospel of our Redeemer, but even by the feelings of humanity, so an inclination to conscientious activity therein would form one of the strongest proofs that we are the subjects of grace, and partakers of that spirit of universal benevolence and genuine philanthropy, which appear so eminent in the character of God himself."

"The most glorious works of grace that have ever took place, have been in answer to prayer; and it is in this way, we have the greatest reason to suppose, that the glorious out-pouring of the Spirit, which we expect at last, will be bestowed."

"Many can do nothing but pray, and prayer is perhaps the only thing in which Christians of all denominations can cordially, and unreservedly unite; but in this we may all be one, and in this the strictest unanimity ought to prevail. Were the whole body thus animated by one soul, with what pleasure would Christians attend on all the duties of religion, and with what delight would their ministers attend on all the business of their calling. We must not be contented however with praying, without exerting ourselves in the use of means for the obtaining of those things we pray for. Were the children of light, but as wise in their generation as the children of this world, they would stretch every nerve to gain so glorious a prize, nor ever imagine that it was to be obtained in any other way."

"Suppose your prayers aren't answered. What do you say? "Well, it's God's will." "Thy will be done." Fine, but if it's God's will, and He's going to do what He wants to anyway, why the fuck bother praying in the first place? Seems like a big waste of time to me! Couldn't you just skip the praying part and go right to His will? It's all very confusing."

"I noticed that all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answered at about the same 50% rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don't. Same as God, 50-50. Same as the four-leaf clover and the horseshoe, the wishing well and the rabbit's foot, same as the Mojo Man, same as the Voodoo Lady who tells you your fortune by squeezing the goat's testicles, it's all the same: 50-50. So just pick your superstition, sit back, make a wish, and enjoy yourself."

"To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions they demand, is to fall into superstition."

"Can a little speck in the vast universe truly address the Infinite? The answer is that Prayer is precisely what converts that little speck into an entity of inestimable and cosmic significance."

"He prayeth best who loveth best All things, both great and small."

"He prayeth well who loveth well Both man and bird and beast."

"To feel the supreme and moving beauty of the spectacle to which Nature invites her ephemeral guests! … that is what I call prayer."

"People in intolerable circumstances will pray to anything. Truly, there are no atheists in foxholes: the men there pray to the bombs that they may land somewhere else."

"Every third-grader knows that prayer is the lifting up of one's mind and heart to God. But there are many ways of lifting. It begins with vocal prayer, the one all of us are so familiar with. It goes on to mental prayer and meditation, a prayer that all too many people are unfamiliar with. This "lifting" also includes the prayer of silence, the prayer of the heart, contemplative prayer, unknown to still more people."

"The man who prays in secret is far more likely to be sincere than he who loves to pray standing in the street, or in the great congregation."

"In memorizing the prayer, it may be helpful to remind yourself that you are not addressing some extraterrestrial being outside you. The kingdom of heaven is within us, and the Lord is enshrined in the depths of our own consciousness. In this prayer we are calling deep into ourselves, appealing to the spark of the divine that is our real nature."

"Prayer that craves a particular commodity, — any thing less than all good, — is vicious."

"First pray for the gift of tears, so that through sorrowing you may tame what is savage in your soul. And having confessed your transgressions to the Lord, you will obtain forgiveness from Him."

"When praying on behalf of Pharaoh to remove the plague of hail from him, Moses went out of the town to do so (Exod. 9. 20), because he would not pray in the midst of the idols and abominations that polluted the place and rendered it unfit for prayer to the throne of mercy. He went into the open, pure air of God to pray to God."

"David advisedly calls one of his Psalms (Psalm 90) 'A prayer of Moses, the man of God,' and another Psalm (Psalm 102) he names 'A prayer of the afflicted,' to convey to us the truth that the prayer of the greatest and of the most humble of men, that of the richest and that of the poorest, of the slave and of the master, are equal before God."

"If your hands are stained by dishonesty, your prayers will be polluted and impure, and an offence to Him to whom you direct them. Do not pray at all before you have your hands purified from every dishonest act."

"God requires but earnest prayer and a penitent heart. Israel was redeemed from Egypt in answer to prayer. Joshua became a conqueror because of his prayer; in the days of the judges help was obtained by prayer; Samuel's help for his people was granted in reply to prayer."

"Reader, pray that soon this Iron Age Will crumble, and Beauty escape the rusting cage."

"Many assume prayer is merely a religious ritual, concerning only “personal spirituality,” unrelated to public events or social justice. But for Chinese Christians like me, facing the “December 9 Early Rain Church Case,” prayer is both worship and indictment."

"He kneels and prays to heaven but nothing happens."

"I used to think that prayer should have the first place and teaching the second. I now feel that it would be truer to give prayer the first, second and third place, and teaching the fourth."

"Prayer is not an asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is a daily admission of one's weakness."

"In spite of despair staring me in the face on the political horizon, I have never lost my peace. In fact, I have found people who envy my peace. That peace, I tell you, comes from prayer; I am not a man of learning, but I humbly claim to be a man of prayer. I am indifferent as to the form. Every one is a law unto himself in that respect. But there are some well-marked roads, and it is safe to walk along the beaten tracks, trod by the ancient teachers. Well, I have given my personal testimony. Let every one try and find that as a result of daily prayer, he adds some thing new to his life, something which nothing can be compared."

"Supplication, worship, prayer are no superstition; they are acts more real than the acts of eating, drinking, sitting or walking. It is no exaggeration to say that they alone are real."

"Prayer needs no speech. I have not the slightest doubt that prayer is an unfailing means of cleansing the heart of passions. But it must be combined with the utmost humility."

"A prayerful heart is the vehicle and service makes the heart prayerful."

"It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart."

"The prayers of those whose tongues are nectared but whose hearts are full of poison are never heard."

"Do not complain and cry and pray, but open your eyes and see, for the light is all about you, and it is so wonderful, so beautiful, so far beyond anything of which men have ever dreamt, for which they have ever prayed, and it is for ever and for ever."

"Nothing fails like prayer."

"The feeble prayer which a sick person can offer himself is infinitely better than all the prayers offered for him by others."

"When left her parents' house they blessed her, and prayed that she might be the mother of millions of people (Gen. 24. 60). Yet she was barren till she herself and Isaac supplicated the Lord. Hence we see that it makes a difference who offers prayers.--Gen. Rabba 60."

"At church, with meek and unaffected grace, His looks adorn'd the venerable place; Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, And fools, who came to scoff, remain'd to pray."

"From the point of Light within the Mind of God"

"Let light stream forth into the minds of men."

"Let Light descend on Earth."

"From the point of Love within the Heart of God"

"Let love stream forth into the hearts of men."

"May Christ return to Earth."

"From the centre where the Will of God is known"

"Let purpose guide the little wills of men –"

"The purpose which the Masters know and serve."

"From the centre which we call the race of men"

"Let the Plan of Love and Light work out"

"And may it seal the door where evil dwells."

"Let Light and Love and Power restore the Plan on Earth."

"For beginners prayer is like a joyous fire kindled in the heart; for the perfect it is like a vigorous sweet-scented light. Or again, prayer is the preaching of the Apostles, an action of faith or, rather, faith itself, 'that makes real for us the things for which we hope' (Heb. 11:1), active love, angelic impulse, the power of the bodiless spirits, their work and delight, the Gospel of God, the heart's assurance, hope of salvation, a sign of purity, a token of holiness, knowledge of God, baptism made manifest, purification in the water of regeneration, a pledge of the Holy Spirit, the exultation of Jesus, the soul's delight, God's mercy, a sign of reconciliation, the seal of Christ, a ray of the noetic sun, the heart's dawn-star, the confirmation of the Christian faith, the disclosure of reconciliation with God, God's grace, God's wisdom or, rather, the origin of true and absolute Wisdom; the revelation of God, the work of monks, the life of hesychasts, the source of stillness, and expression of the angelic state. Why say more? Prayer is God, who accomplishes everything in everyone (cf. 1 Cor. 12:6), for there is a single action of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, activating all things through Christ Jesus."

"Narrated As-Saburah: The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: Command a boy to pray when he reaches the age of seven years. When he becomes ten years old, then beat him for prayer."

"Narrated Abdullah ibn Amr ibn al-'As: The Apostle of Allah (peace be upon him) said: Command your children to pray when they become seven years old, and beat them for it (prayer) when they become ten years old; and arrange their beds (to sleep) separately."

"What returns does prayer show? None, if it is real prayer. For prayer is for growth. We can therefore, never return to what we were thank heaven, for we are growers. So prayer is a call. And it's answered by a call. We call up and we are called on. We're summoned, told to advance, to grow. That's the nerve of prayer, as prayer is the nerve of religion."

"He that will learn to pray, let him go to Sea."

"In prayer the lips ne'er act the winning part Without the sweet concurrence of the heart."

"Prayer invites the Eternal Presence to suffuse or spirits and let God's will prevail in our lives. Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will."

"The focus of prayer is not the self. … It is the momentary disregard of our personal concerns, the absence of self-centered thoughts, which constitute the art of prayer. Feeling becomes prayer in the moment in which we forget ourselves and become aware of God. .... Thus, in beseeching Him for bread, there is one instant, at least, in which our mind is directed neither to our hunger nor to food, but to His mercy. This instant is prayer. We start with a personal concern and live to feel the utmost."

"Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy. And yet being alive is no answer to the problems of living. To be or not to be is not the question. The vital question is: how to be and how not to be? The tendency to forget this vital question is the tragic disease of contemporary man, a disease that may prove fatal, that may end in disaster. To pray is to recollect passionately the perpetual urgency of this vital question."

"Is there never a chink in the world above Where they listen for words from below?"

"The prayer of Noah, He cried out in the darkness, Hear, O God, Hear HIM: hear this one; through the gates of death, If life be all past praying for, O give To Thy great multitude a way to peace; Give them to HIM."

"I have lived to thank God that all my prayers have not been answered."

"It may be that ministers really think that their prayers do good, and it may be that frogs imagine that their croaking brings spring."

"Who is a worshiper? What is prayer? What is real religion? Let me answer these questions. Good, honest, faithful work, is worship. The man who ploughs the fields and fells the forests; the man who works in mines, the man who battles with the winds and waves out on the wide sea, controlling the commerce of the world; these men are worshipers. The man who goes into the forest, leading his wife by the hand, who builds him a cabin, who makes a home in the wilderness, who helps to people and civilize and cultivate a continent, is a worshiper. Labor is the only prayer that Nature answers; it is the only prayer that deserves an answer, — good, honest, noble work."

"…prayer is more powerful than prison bars, more enduring than legal persecution."

"If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, "Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled"; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit? Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead."

"The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much."

"But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched. Prayer in this wide sense is the very soul and essence of religion."

"But though I repeated my plea, and waited on my knees for nearly an hour, there was no answer."

"Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done; on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen."

"I have visited a few astronauts, but all three either ignored me or prayed. The senseless chanting, I confess, repulsed me."

"If prayer is an offering of the lips and pleasing to God, then mercifulness is actually the heart’s offering and is, as Scripture says, a sweet fragrance in God’s nostrils. Oh, when you think of God, never forget that he does not have the least understanding about money. My listener, if you were a speaker, what assignment would you choose: to speak to the rich about practicing generosity or to the poor about practicing mercifulness? I am quite sure which one I would choose or, rather, which one I have chosen-if only I were a speaker. Oh, there is something indescribably reconciling in speaking to the poor man about practicing mercifulness!"

"The surprising happened to him. In proportion as he became more and more earnest in prayer, he had less and less to say, and in the end he became quite silent. He became silent – indeed, what is if possible still more expressly the opposite of speaking, he became a hearer. He had supposed that to pray is to speak; he learnt that to pray is not merely to be silent but to hear. And so it is; to pray is not to hear oneself speak, but it is to be silent, and to remain silent, to wait, until the man who prays hears God."

"Lord Jesus Christ, our foolish minds are weak; they are more than willing to be drawn—and there is so much that wants to draw us to itself. There is pleasure with its seductive power, the multiplicity with its bewildering distractions, the moment with its infatuating importance and the conceited laboriousness of busyness and the careless time-wasting of light-mindedness and the gloomy brooding of heavy-mindedness—all this will draw us away from ourselves to itself in order to deceive us. But you, who are truth, only you, our Savior and Redeemer, can truly draw a person to yourself, which you have promised to do—that you will draw all to yourself. Then may God grant that by repenting we may come to ourselves, so that you, according to your Word, can draw us to yourself—from on high, but through lowliness and abasement."

"In the face of real danger Elak forgot the gods and drew his rapier. Prayers, he had found, would not halt a dagger’s blow or a strangler’s hands."

"All the world screamed. The Reverend did not pray, having decided long ago his boss had already made up his mind about things."

"A knowledge of the hidden side of life by no means teaches us to forget our dead, but it makes us exceedingly careful as to how we think of them; it warns us that we must adopt a resolutely unselfish attitude, that we must forget all about ourselves, and the pain of the apparent separation, and think of them neither with grief nor with longing, but always with strong affectionate wishes for their happiness and their progress. The clairvoyant sees exactly in what manner such wishes affect them, and at once perceives the truth which underlies the teaching of the Catholic Church with regard to the advisability of prayers for the dead. By these both the living and the dead are helped; for the former, instead of being thrown back upon his grief with a hopeless feeling that now he can do nothing, since there is a great gulf between himself and his loved one, is encouraged to turn his affectionate thought into definite action which promotes the happiness and advancement of him who has passed from his sight in the physical world."

"If she had supposed the gods ever listened, she would have prayed."

"At Tai Ji Men, I realized that prayer is not merely a ritual but a form of deep reflection and meaningful action."

"He spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint."

"Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed."

"For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them."

"Prayer was not so much a matter of asking for something as a clear statement of what was important to you; a definition of who you were, and what you lacked, what you were sorry for, what you wished to be. A peeling away to your essence."

"She thought about praying, but learned long ago there’d be no answer."

"“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”"

"“And for what it’s worth, which in my professional opinion isn’t a bloody lot, I’ll pray for you.” “Pray to what?” Marge said. He smiled.... “Fuck it,” the man said. “Tell you what. What’s the point collecting stuff you don’t use? I’ll pray to all of them.”"

"For those who do not guard their morals, Prayers are but wishful thinking. For those who do not practice what they preach, Oratory is but faithless lying."

"Hear his sighs though mute; Unskillful with what words to pray, let me Interpret for him."

"But that from us aught should ascend to Heav'n So prevalent as to concern the mind Of God, high-bless'd, or to incline His will, Hard to belief may seem; yet this will prayer."

"And if by prayer Incessant I could hope to change the will Of Him who all things can, I would not cease To weary Him with my assiduous cries."

"Mein einziges Gebet ist das um Vertiefung. Durch sie allein kann ich wieder zu Gott gelangen. Vertiefung! Vertiefung!"

"There are not petitional or intercessory prayers in Buddhism. However much we may pray to the Buddha we cannot be saved. The Buddha does not grant favors to those who pray to Him. Instead of petitional prayers there is meditation that leads to self-control, purification and enlightenment. Meditation is neither a silent reverie nor keeping the mind blank. It is an active striving. It serves as a tonic both to the heart and the mind. The Buddha not only speaks of the futility of offering prayers but also disparages a slave mentality. A Buddhist should not pray to be saved, but should rely on himself and win his freedom."

"I don't need to pray. I have God in myself."

"I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also; I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also."

"Praying without ceasing is not ritualized, nor are there even words. It is a constant state of awareness of oneness with God; it is a sincere seeking for a good thing; and it is a concentration on the thing sought, with faith that it is obtainable."

"I talk to God but the sky is empty."

"I used to pray to recover you."

"Oh dear Pan and all the other Gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside."

"He pray'd by quantity, And with his repetitions, long and loud, All knees were weary."

"Oats knelt in the mud and tried a prayer, but there was no answering voice from the sky. There never had been. He’d been told never to expect one. That wasn’t how Om worked anymore. Alone of all the gods, he’d been taught, Om delivered the answers straight into the depths of the head. Since the prophet Brutha, Om was the silent god. That’s what they said. If you didn’t have faith, then you weren’t anything. There was just the dark. He shuddered in the gloom. Was the god silent, or was there no one to speak?"

"That’s what prayers are...it’s frightened people trying to make friends with the bully!"

"God detests the prayers of a person who ignores the law."

"When trouble toucheth a man, He crieth unto Us (in all postures)- lying down on his side, or sitting, or standing. But when We have solved his trouble, he passeth on his way as if he had never cried to Us for a trouble that touched him! thus do the deeds of transgressors seem fair in their eyes!"

"Observe prayer at early morning, at the close of the day, and at the approach of night; for the good deeds drive away the evil deeds."

"Put up then with what they say; and celebrate the praise of thy Loud before the sunrise, and before its setting: and some time in the night do thou praise Him, and in the extremes of the day, that thou haply mayest please Him."

"Observe prayer at sunset, till the first darkening of the night, and the daybreak reading-for the daybreak reading hath its witnesses', and watch unto it in the night: this shall he an excess in service."

"Seek aid with patience and prayer."

"When ye have fulfilled your prayer, remember God standing and sitting, and lying on your sides; and when ye are in safety, then be steadfast in prayer-. Verily prayer is for the believers prescribed and timed."

"But what happens in true petitionary prayer when it is part of genuine religion? Human beings face the incomprehensible plan of their existence, which they accept as at once incomprehensible and yet as originating in the wisdom and love of God; however it may turn out, whether it brings life or death. people then have a sense of themselves, with their own identity and vital impulses, as willed by God, without waiting to produce or force an intelligible synthesis between their vital impulses and the plan of their existence. And so they say Yes to the incomprehensibility of God and to their own will to live, without wanting to know how the two fit together. The unity of the two, which is not something that we can create, is petitionary prayer, since it is only prayer if it says radically, "Your will, not mine", and it would not be petitionary prayer if it did not dare to ask God for something which we had thought of ourselves. Petitionary prayer is thus simply actualising the incomprehensibility of human existence which, down to the last fibre, comes from God alone and goes out to him, and yet is such that it can hold its own before God and not be destroyed."

"Passion is the power of prayer."

"The Divine wisdom has given us prayer, not as a means whereby to obtain the good things of earth, but as a means whereby we learn to do without them; not as a means whereby we escape evil, but as a means whereby we become strong to meet it."

"It is not by prayer and humility that you cause things to go as you wish, but by acquiring a knowledge of natural laws."

"When does the building of the Spirit really begin to appear in a man's heart? It begins, so far as we can judge, when he first pours out his heart to God in prayer."

"I do not pray to ask God for things. I pray to thank God for bringing me where I am."

"“You and your wife are in the prayers of me and our church,” he says to Rimney. “Despite of what you may think of me.” “You’re in my prayers, too,” says Rimney. “I’m always praying you stop being so sanctimonious and miraculously get less full of shit.”"

"It was quite incomprehensible to me — this was before I began going to school — why in my evening prayers I should pray for human beings only. So when my mother had prayed with me and had kissed me good-night, I used to add silently a prayer that I had composed myself for all living creatures. It ran thus: "O, heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath; guard them from all evil, and let them sleep in peace.""

"Prayer is the expression of desire; its value comes from our inward aspirations, from their tenor and their strength. Take away desire, the prayer ceases; increase or diminish its intensity, the prayer soars upward or has no wings. Inversely, take away the expression while leaving the desire, and the prayer in many ways remains intact. Has a child who says nothing but looks longingly at a toy in a shop-window, and then at his smiling mother, not formulated the most moving prayer? And even if he had not seen the toy, is not the desire for play, innate in the child as is the thirst for movement, in the eyes of his parents a standing prayer which they grant?"

"Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart, with strings of steel, Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe."

"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; Words without thoughts never to heaven go."

"All his mind is bent to holiness, To number Ave-Maries on his beads."

"Rather let my head Stoop to the block than these knees bow to any Save to the God of heaven and to my king."

"Go with me, like good angels, to my end; And, as the long divorce of steel falls on me, Make of your prayers one sweet sacrifice, And lift my soul to heaven."

"My prayers Are not words duly hallow'd nor my wishes More worth than empty vanities; yet prayers and wishes Are all I can return."

""Amen" Stuck in my throat."

"When I would pray and think, I think and pray To several subjects; Heaven hath my empty words."

"His worst fault is, that he is given to prayer; he is something peevish that way; but nobody but has his fault; but let that pass."

"Well, if my wind were but long enough to say my prayers, I would repent."

"If you bethink yourself of any crime Unreconcil'd as yet to heaven and grace, Solicit for it straight."

"I find that prayers don’t work when you need them most. Unless you answer them for yourself."

"If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses?"

"Prayer is not used to inform, for God is omniscient; not to move compassion, for God is without passions; not to show gratitude, for God knows our hearts. May not a man, that has true notions, be a pious man, though he be silent?"

"For Adoration, incense comes From bezoar, and Arabian gums, And from the civet’s fur: But as for prayer, or e’er it faints, Far better is the breath of saints Than galbanum or myrrh."

"Children are the keys of Paradise … They alone are good and wise, Because their thoughts, their very lives, are prayer."

"The first things that hinders the prayer of a good man from obtaining its effects is a violent anger, and a violent storm in the spirit him who prayers."

"At the highest level of consciousness, an individual is alone. Such solitude can seem strange, unusual, even difficult. Foolish people try to escape it by means of various dissipations in order to get away from this high point, to some lower point, but wise people remain at this high point, with the help of prayer."

"Not prayer without faith, nor faith without prayer, but prayer in faith, is the cost of spiritual gifts and graces."

"It is best to read the weather forecast before we pray for rain."

"School children and students who love God should never say: “For my part I like mathematics”; “I like French”; “I like Greek.” They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer."

"MENDEL: Once you’re on your knees, you can’t stand up straight again."

"True prayer is waiting for God to come when and how He wants to."

"Rapt into still communion that transcends The imperfect offices of prayer and praise, His mind was a thanksgiving to the power That made him; it was blessedness and love!"

"God, though this life is but a wraith, Although we know not what we use, Although we grope with little faith, Give me the heart to fight—and lose."

"From compromise and things half done, Keep me with stern and stubborn pride; And when, at last, the fight is won, God, keep me still unsatisfied."

"We ask for the aid of thy Holy Spirit to teach us how to pray, what we should ask for, and how to ask that we may receive."

"Prayer ardent opens heaven."

"Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen."

"Yet then from all my grief, O Lord, Thy mercy set me free, Whilst in the confidence of pray'r My soul took hold on thee."

"And from the prayer of Want, and plaint of Woe, O never, never turn away thine ear! Forlorn, in this bleak wilderness below, Ah! what were man, should Heaven refuse to hear!"

"She knows omnipotence has heard her prayer And cries, "It shall be done—sometime, somewhere.""

"Just my vengeance complete, The man sprang to his feet, Stood erect, caught at God's skirts, and prayed! So, I was afraid!"

"They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright!"

"Father! no prophet's laws I seek,— Thy laws in Nature's works appear;— I own myself corrupt and weak, Yet will I pray, for thou wilt hear."

"Father of Light! Great God of Heaven! Hear'st thou the accents of despair? Can guilt like man's be e'er forgiven? Can vice atone for crimes by prayer?"

"Pray to be perfect, though material leaven Forbid the spirit so on earth to be; But if for any wish thou darest not pray, Then pray to God to cast that wish away."

"The saints will aid if men will call: For the blue sky bends over all."

"But maybe prayer is a road to rise, A mountain path leading toward the skies To assist the spirit who truly tries. But it isn't a shibboleth, creed, nor code, It isn't a pack-horse to carry your load, It isn't a wagon, it's only a road. And perhaps the reward of the spirit who tries Is not the goal, but the exercise!"

"Not as we wanted it, But as God granted it."

"I always pray before any of the operation. I think God help me know what to do."

"And Satan trembles when he sees The weakest saint upon his knees."

"I ask not a life for the dear ones, All radiant, as others have done, But that life may have just enough shadow To temper the glare of the sun; I would pray God to guard them from evil, But my prayer would bound back to myself: Ah! a seraph may pray for a sinner, But a sinner must pray for himself."

"Our vows are heard betimes! and Heaven takes care To grant, before we can conclude the prayer: Preventing angels met it half the way, And sent us back to praise, who came to pray."

"Grant folly's prayers that hinder folly's wish, And serve the ends of wisdom."

"Almighty Father! let thy lowly child, Strong in his love of truth, be wisely bold,— A patriot bard, by sycophants reviled, Let him live usefully, and not die old!"

"Though I am weak, yet God, when prayed, Cannot withhold his conquering aid."

"True prayer is only another name for the love of God. Its excellence does not consist in the multitude of our words; for our Father knoweth what things we have need of before we ask Him. The true prayer is that of the heart, and the heart prays only for what it desires. To pray, then, is to desire — but to desire what God would have us desire. He who desires not from the bottom of his heart, offers a deceitful prayer."

"Ejaculations are short prayers darted up to God on emergent occasions. They are the artillery of devotion, and their principal use is against the fiery darts of the devil."

"So a good prayer, though often used, is still fresh and fair in the ears and eyes of Heaven."

"O Lord of Courage grave, O Master of this night of Spring! Make firm in me a heart too brave To ask Thee anything."

"Who goes to bed, and doth not pray, Maketh two nights to every day!"

"Resort to sermons, but to prayers most: Praying's the end of preaching."

"O God, if in the day of battle I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me."

"My brother kneels, so saith Kabir, To stone and brass in heathen-wise, But in my brother's voice I hear My own unanswered agonies. His God is as his fates assign His prayer is all the world's—and mine."

"I ask and wish not to appear More beauteous, rich or gay: Lord, make me wiser every year, And better every day."

"You know I say Just what I think, and nothing more nor less, And, when I pray, my heart is in my prayer. I cannot say one thing and mean another: If I can't pray, I will not make believe!"

"Let one unceasing, earnest prayer Be, too, for light, for strength to bear Our portion of the weight of care, That crushes into dumb despair One half the human race."

"Like one in prayer I stood."

"Vigilate et orate."

"O Domine Deus! speravi in te; O care mi Jesu! nunc libera me. In dura catena, in misera poena, Disidero te. Languendo, jemendo, et genuflectendo, Adoro, imploro, ut liberes me!"

"God warms his hands at man's heart when he prays."

"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you."

"Every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth."

"Not what we wish, but what we want, Oh! let thy grace supply, The good unask'd, in mercy grant; The ill, though ask'd, deny."

"Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, Uttered or unexpressed, The motion of a hidden fire That trembles in the breast."

"Prayer moves the arm Which moves the world, And brings salvation down."

"As down in the sunless retreats of the ocean Sweet flowers are springing no mortal can see, So deep in my soul the still prayer of devotion Unheard by the world, rises silent to Thee."

"O sad estate Of human wretchedness; so weak is man, So ignorant and blind, that did not God Sometimes withhold in mercy what we ask, We should be ruined at our own request."

"Now I lay me down to take my sleep, I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep; If I should die before I wake, I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take."

"Father of All! in every age, In every clime ador'd, By saint, by savage, and by sage, Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!"

"If I am right, Thy grace impart, Still in the right to stay; If I am wrong, O teach my heart To find that better way!"

"In all thou dost first let thy Prayers ascend, And to the Gods thy Labours first commend, From them implore Success, and hope a prosperous End."

"They were ordinary soldiers, just the common Jean and Hans, One from the valley of the Rhine and one from fair Provence. They were simple-hearted fellows — every night each said his prayer: The one prayed Vater Unser and the other Notre Père."

"At the muezzin's call for prayer, The kneeling faithful thronged the square, And on Pushkara's lofty height The dark priest chanted Brahma's might. Amid a monastery's weeds An old Franciscan told his beads; While to the synagogue there came A Jew to praise Jehovah's name. The one great God looked down and smiled And counted each His loving child; For Turk and Brahmin, monk and Jew Had reached Him through the gods they knew."

"I pray the prayer the Easterners do, May the peace of Allah abide with you; Wherever you stay, wherever you go, May the beautiful palms of Allah grow; Through days of labor, and nights of rest, The love of Good Allah make you blest; So I touch my heart—as the Easterners do, May the peace of Allah abide with you."

"In vota miseros ultimus cogit timor."

"Nulla res carius constat quam quæ precibus empta est."

"The first petition that we are to make to Almighty God is for a good conscience, the next for health of mind, and then of body."

"Earth bears no balsams for mistakes; Men crown the knave, and scourge the tool That did his will: but thou, O Lord, Be merciful to me, a fool."

"Four things which are not in thy treasury, I lay before thee, Lord, with this petition:— My nothingness, my wants, My sins, and my contrition."

"Prayers are heard in heaven very much in proportion to our faith. Little faith will get very great mercies, but great faith still greater."

"To pray together, in whatever tongue or ritual, is the most tender brotherhood of hope and sympathy that men can contract in this life."

"Holy Father, in thy mercy, Hear our anxious prayer. Keep our loved ones, now far absent, 'Neath Thy care."

"Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take, And stab my spirit broad awake; Or, Lord, if too obdurate I, Choose Thou, before that spirit die, A piercing pain, a killing sin, And to my dead heart turn them in."

"My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted."

"Speak to Him thou for He hears, and spirit with spirit can meet— Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet."

"More things are wrought by prayer Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice Rise like a fountain for me night and day. For what are men better than sheep or goats That nourish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer Both for themselves and those who call them friend?"

"Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer."

"'Twas then belike," Honorious cried, "When you the public fast defied, Refused to heav'n to raise a prayer, Because you'd no connections there."

"Prayer is The world in tune, A spirit-voyce, And vocall joyes, Whose Eccho is heaven's blisse."

"Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando."

"Audiit, et voti Phœbus succedere partem Mente didit, partem volucres dispersit in auras."

"J'ai toujours fait une prière à Dieu, qui est fort courte. La voici: Mon Dieu, rendez nos ennemis bien ridicules! Dieu m'a exaucé."

"Prayer moves the Hand which moves the world."

"Who is this before whose presence idols tumble to the sod? While he cries out—"Allah Akbar! and there is no god but God!""

"Making their lives a prayer."

"Though smooth be the heartless prayer, no ear in heaven will mind it; And the finest phrase falls dead, if there is no feeling behind it."

"The imperfect offices of prayer and praise."

""What is good for a bootless bene?" With these dark words begins my Tale; And their meaning is, whence can comfort spring When Prayer is of no avail?"

"The bells of Ryleston seemed to say, While she sat listening in the shade, With vocal music, "God us ayde!" And all the hills were glad to bear Their part in this effectual prayer."

"Doubt not but God who sits on high, Thy secret prayers can hear; When a dead wall thus cunningly Conveys soft whispers to the ear."

"A certain joyful, though humble, confidence becomes us when we pray in the Mediator's name. It is due to Him; when we pray in His name it should be without wavering. Remember His merits, and how prevalent they must be. " Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace.""

"The reason why we obtain no more in prayer, is because we expect no more. God usually answers us according to our own hearts."

"Let your prayers be composed of thanksgiving, praise, confession, and petition, without any argument or exhortation addressed to those who are supposed to be praying with you. Adopt no fixed forms of expression, except such as you obtain from Scripture. Express your desire in the briefest, simplest form, without circumlocution. Hallow God's name by avoiding its unnecessary repetition. Adopt the simple devotional phrases of Scripture; but avoid the free use of its figures, and all quaint and doubtful application of its terms to foreign subjects. Pray to God and not to man."

"Like an echo from a ruined castle, prayer is an echo from the ruined human soul of the sweet promise of God."