“The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.”

When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.

To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.

The important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially.

Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.

Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas.

The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.

It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value.

Every consciousness pursues the death of the other.

America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself.

What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

Art does not simply reveal God: it is one of the ways in which God reveals, and thus actualizes, himself.

Too fair to worship, too divine to love.

World history is a court of judgment.

It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained.

Devotion – a state of mind in which it refuses to occupy itself any longer with the limited and particular.

Thinking is, indeed, essentially the negation of that which is before us.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

Man is the cruelest animal.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

Human ‘beans’ is the only animals that is killing their own kind.

Of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable.

Animals are my friends and I don’t eat my friends.

No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human.