Merchant Empires Weblog

Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others.

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

The body is not a permanent dwelling, but a sort of inn...which is to be left behind when one perceives that one is a burden to the host.

I lay it down as a fact that if all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.

I think that I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

Universal doubt cancels itself.

Leibniz never married; he had considered it at the age of fifty; but the person he had in mind asked for time to reflect. This gave Leibniz time to reflect, too, and so he never married.

Whenever kingship approaches tyranny it is near its end, for by this it becomes ripe for division.

The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.

What you do not wish others should do unto you, do not do unto them.

'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.

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.

Men are deceived if they think themselves free, an opinion which consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth - in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world - have not any subsistence without a mind.

Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom.

Many people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it.

Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity... it is part of nature.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.