legaturi

"We cannot ‘know’ our selves at all, for we are not any thing to be known: we can only be ourselves - ‘our selves’ being what-we-are.
And how is that to be done?
It is not to be done. It is. Everything is as it is."

"Whoever believes in a God ought to respect him to highly to make him Creator of the world."

"Therefore, social science itself, the science of the future, will necessarily continue to ignore them [individuals]. All that we have a right to demand of it is that it shall point us with faithful and sure had to the general causes of individual suffering - among these causes it will not forget the immolation and subordination (still to frequent, alas!) of living individuals to abstract generalities - at the same time showing us the general conditions necessary to the real emancipation of the individuals living in society. That is its mission; those are its limits, beyond which the action of social science can be only impotent and fatal. Beyond those limits being the doctrinaire and governmental pretensions of its licensed representatives, its priests; we want them no longer, even if they call themselves Social Democrats."

"Until now all human history has been only a perpetual and bloody immolation of millions of poor human beings in honor of some pitiless abstraction - God, country, power of State, national honors, historical rights, judicial rights, political liberty, public welfare. Such has been up to-day the natural, spontaneous, and inevitable movement of human societies. We cannot undo it; we must submit to it so far as the past is concerned, as we submit to all natural fatalities. We must believe that that was the only possible way to educate the human race. For we must not deceive ourselves: even in attributing the larger part to the Machiavellian wiles of the governing classes, we have to recognize that no minority would have been powerful enough to impose all these horrible sacrifices upon the masses if there had not been in the masses themselves a dizzy spontaneous movement which pushed them on to continual self-sacrifice, now to one, now to another of these devouring abstractions, the vampires of history, ever nourished upon human blood."

"Life is wholly fugitive and temporary, but also wholly palpitating with reality and individuality, sensibility, sufferings, joys, aspirations, needs, and passions. It alone spontaneously creates real things and beings. Science creates nothing; it establishes and recognizes only the creations of life. And every time that scientific men, emerging from their abstract world, mingle with living creation in the real world, all that they propose or create is poor, ridiculously abstract, bloodless and lifeless, still-born, like the homunculus created by Wagner, the pedantic disciple of the immortal Doctor Faust. It follows that the only mission of science is to enlighten life, not to govern it."

"What one can become he does become."

"it is only through flesh that I can break the tyranny of mind; for it is only when a man hears his flesh along with the rest of him that he hears himself wholly, and it is only when he wholly hears himself that he is a hearing or rational being."

"As I read each author, I made a practice of adopting and following up all his ideas, without any admixture of my own or of those of anyone else, and without ever attempting to argue with him. I said to myself: „Let me begin by laying up a store of ideas, on matter whether they be true of false, provided only they are definite, until my head is sufficiently equipped with them to be able to select and compare them.” I know that this method is not without its inconveniences; but it has answered my purpose of self-instruction. After I had spent some years in thinking exactly as others thought, without, so to speak, reflecting, and almost without reasoning, I found myself in possession of a fund of learning sufficient to satisfy myself, and to enable me to think without the assistance of another."

"We began, without thinking of it, to be inseparable, to share, as it were, our existence in common; and feeling that we were not only necessary, but sufficient, for each other, we accustomed ourselves to think of nothing that was foreign to us, to limit our happiness and all our desires to that possession of each other, which was, perhaps, unique of its kind amongst human beings, which, as I have said, was not love, but a more real possession, which, without being dependent upon the senses, sex, age or personal appearence, was concerned with all that which makes one what one is, and which one can only lose by ceasing to exist"