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If my view of the function of philosophy is correct, it is the most effective of all the intellectual pursuits. It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent:- and the spiritual precedes the material.

What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?

The whole of that philosophy which begins with Plato and ends with Plotinus is the development of a principle that we should formulate thus: “There is more in the immutable than in the moving, and one passes from the stable to the unstable by a simple diminution.” Now the contrary is the truth.

Nothing would prevent other worlds, corresponding to another choice, from existing with it, in the same place and the same time: in this way twenty different broadcasting stations throw out simultaneously twenty different concerts which coexist without any one of them mingling it’s sounds with the music of another, each one being heard, complete and alone, in the apparatus which has chosen for its reception...

...for you cannot shorten psychological life by a single instant without modifying its content. Can you shorten the length of a melody without altering its nature? The inner life is that very melody.

“In a way, I suppose it was inevitable. The human race never did invent an institution that didn’t end as a cancer.”

Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.

Thus it is true that the path of science is slow, tentative and laborious. That cannot be denied or altered. No wonder that the gentlemen of the opposition are dissatisfied; they are spoilt, they have had an easier time of it with their revelation.

What no human soul desires there is no need to prohibit; it is automatically excluded. The very emphasis of the commandment “Thou shall not kill” makes it certain that we spring from an endless ancestry of murderers, with whom the lust for killing was in the blood, as possibly it is to this day with ourselves.

Only patient, persevering research, in which everything is subordinated to the one requirement of certainty, can gradually bring about change. The benighted traveller may sing aloud in the dark to deny his own fears; but, for all that, he will not see an inch further beyond his nose.

We know well enough how little light science has so far been able to throw on the problems that surround us. But however much ado philosophers may make, they cannot alter the situation.

In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is not therefore the result of it but it’s motive. It is as if it had been a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.

Colloquial speech, which is certainly no matter of chance but the deposit, as it were, of ancient knowledge- a thing which must not indeed be made too much of...

But man’s craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind.

The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries.

Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the centre of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, although Alexandria doctrines taught something very similar.

It seems very evident that one person’s narcissism has a great attraction for those others who have renounced part of their own narcissism and are seeking after object-love; the charm of a child lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self-sufficiency and inaccessibility, just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and the large beasts of prey.

I need hardly say much to you about the importance of authority. Only very few civilized persons are capable of existing without reliance on others or are even capable of coming to an independent opinion. You cannot exaggerate the intensity of man’s inner resolution and craving for authority. The extraordinary increase in the neuroses since the power of religion has waned May give you some indication of it.

Said Leonardo, “the art of painting works per via di porre, that is to say, by placing little heaps of paint where they have not been before on the uncoloured canvas; sculpturing, on the other hand, works per via di levare, that is to say, it takes away from the stone as much as covers the surface of the statue therein contained.”

The word “cause” is, in short, an altar to an unknown god; an empty pedestal still marking the place of a hoped-for statue. Any really inward belonging-together of the sequent terms, if discovered, would be accepted as the word cause was meant to stand for.

It takes, in short, what Berkeley calls a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to ask for the why of any instinctive human act.

Any object which remains uncontradicted is ipso facto believed and posited as absolute reality.

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?
And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?

No, my friend; I only created freedom. I freed one person. I freed myself. The nature of my process, which, as I have demonstrated, is the only correct anarchist process, did not permit me to free any more. Whom I could free, I freed.

By all working for the same anarchist goal, each one contributes his own energies wherever they may be directed, to the destruction of social fictions and the creation of the free society of the future; and by working separately we are not able, in any way, to create new tyrannies...

In short, the only things which we commonly see are those which we preperceive and the only things which we preperceive are those which have been labeled for us, and the labels stamped into our mind. If we lost stock of our labels we should be intellectually lost in the midst of the world.

Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.

The reader who finds any comfort in the idea of the Soul, is, however, perfectly free to continue to believe in it; for our reasonings have not established the non-existence of the Soul; they have only proved its superfluity for scientific purposes.

The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a sound to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of something which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully, without growing more distinct. Every one must know the tantalizing effect of the blank rhythm of some forgotten verse restlessly dancing in one’s mind, striving to be filled out with words.