75 quotes
Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity.
In a measure the Great Sadness was lifted from me, and, where I had seen omnipresent death, I saw now everywhere the pageant and triumph of life.
Transition (1927)
By mind I mean the totality of perceptions, memories and ideas in an organism.
Fallen Leaves (2014)
Here and everywhere is the struggle for existence, life inextricably enmeshed with war. All life living at the expense of life, every organism eating other organisms forever.
Fallen Leaves (2014)
Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
War is one of the constants of history, and has not diminished with civilization or democracy.
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large.
Here is a fulfillment of long centuries of civilization and culture; here, in romantic love, more than the triumph of thought or the victories of power is the topmost reach of human beings.
Fallen Leaves (2014)
Rooted in freedom, bonded in the fellowship of danger, sharing everywhere a common human blood, we declare again that all men are brothers, and that mutual tolerance is the price of liberty.
Declaration of INTERdependence (1945)
The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints.
Space, subjectively, is the coexistence of perceptions — perceiving two objects at once.
Fallen Leaves (2014)
“The army,” says a Moslem historian, with charming clarity, “is the source and means of government.”
It is Life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.
Fallen Leaves (2014)
History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.
The Gentle Philosopher (2006)
Middle age begins with marriage; for then work and responsibility replace carefree play, passion surrenders to the limitations of social order, and poetry yields to prose.
Fallen Leaves (2014)
The principle of the family was mutual aid; but the principle of society is competition, the struggle for existence, the elimination of the weak and the survival of the strong.
Fallen Leaves (2014)
In Epictetus the Greco-Roman soul has lost its paganism, and is ready for a new faith".
The Story of Philosophy (1926)
Man is as young as the risks he takes.
Fallen Leaves (2014)
In one aspect civilization is the habit of civility; and civility is the refinement which townsmen, who made the word, thought possible only in the civitas or city.