One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.

Reason connot defeat emotion, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion.

Nothing in nature is by chance... Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.

The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.

Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

The highest endeavor of the mind, and the highest virtue, it to understand things by intuition.

...perhaps mankind must have a time of darkness so that we will one day again know what a blessing is the light.

Powerful grateful in the demons mortals in the courier of shadows, Darkened protectors of the rest and dusk of sea, Shadow broken and ashes in my eclipse, Crave force the demons flesh

Without economic development, any potential for political openness and freedom will be questionable.

If we can make the correct diagnosis, the healing can begin. If we can't, both our personal health and our economy are doomed.

Blame is a change-avoidance strategy.

I met my wife on a ferry boat, and when we landed she gave me the slip

Like many modern poets, I tend to conceal rhymes by placing them in the middle of lines, and to avoid immediate alliteration and assonance in favor of echoes placed later in the poems.

Women always try to tame themselves as they get older, but the ones who look best are often a bit wilder.

Mary's greatness consists in the fact that she wants to magnify God, not herself.

In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds.