Philosopher Quotes on Time

“Confine yourself to the present.”

VII, 29

“How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.”

Meditations, Book IV | IV, 18

“Consider thyself to be dead , and to have completed thy life up to the present time; and live according to nature the remainder which is allowed thee.”

Meditations, Book VII | Variant: Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly. VII, 56

“There is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and never return.”

Meditations, Book II | II, 4

“Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.”

Meditations, Book II | II, 7

“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”

Reddite igitur, patres conscripti, ei vitam, cui ademistis. Vita enim mortuorum in memoria est posita vivorum.

“De Natura Deorum–On the Nature of the Gods(45 BC) | Book II, section 2; translation by Francis Brooks”

Variant: For time destroys the fictions of error and opinion, while it confirms the determinations of nature and of truth.

“History is truly the witness of times past, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity; whose voice, but the orator's, can entrust her to immortality?”

De Oratore–On the Orator(55 BC) | Book II, Chapter 9, section 36

“For in order to command well, we should know how to submit; and he who submits with a good grace will some time become worthy of commanding.”

De Legibus(On the Laws)(c. 40s BC) | Book III, section 2; translation by Francis Barham

“The greatest states have been overthrown by the young and sustained and restored by the old. ... Rashness is the product of the budding-time of youth, prudence of the harvest-time of age.”

Cato Maior de Senectute – On Old Age(44 BC) | section 20

“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”

Nausea, 1938

“L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945)”

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

“L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945)”

He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism , smiling tolerance , resignation , common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life.

“Every age has its own poetry ; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.”

Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)

“I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.”

Nausea(1938) | Diary entry of Friday (2 February), concerning a card game

“While we are postponing, life speeds by.”

Letters to Lucilius, 1

“It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough.”

Moral Essays | De Brevitate Vitae ("On the Shortness of Life", trans. John W. Basore), Ch. 1

“Who is everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends .”

Letter II: On discursiveness in reading | Line 2.

“The much occupied man has no time for wantonness, and it is an obvious commonplace that the evils of leisure can be shaken off by hard work.”

Letter LVI: On quiet and study | Line 9

“No man can suffer both severely and for a long time; Nature, who loves us most tenderly, has so constituted us as to make pain either endurable or short.”

Letter LXXVIII: On the Healing Power of the Mind

“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”

La vraie générosité envers l'avenir consiste à tout donner au présent.

“Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.”

The Rebel(1951) | Part 4: Rebellion and Art

“With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be history of its successive regrets and impotences.”

An Absurd Reasoning | Absurd Walls

“In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.”

The Plague(1947)

“In the end, man is not entirely guilty — he did not start history. Nor is he wholly innocent — he continues it.”

The Rebel(1951) | Part 5: Thought at the Meridian (Section: Moderation and Excess)

“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know.”

Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.

“De actis cum Felice Manicheo {AD 404), translated as A Debate with Felix the Manichean , ¶1709, in The Faith of the Early Fathers Vol 3 : St. Augustine to the End of the Patristic Age by W.A. Jurgens, p. 88”

Nowhere in the Gospel do we read that the Lord said: "I am sending you a Paraclete who will teach you about the course of the sun and moon ." For He wanted to make Christians , not mathematicians .

“One does not read in the Gospel that the Lord said: "I will send you the Paraclete who will teach you about the course of the sun and moon." For He willed to make them Christians, not mathematicians. As quoted in Science Teaching : The Role of History and Philosophy of Science (1994) by Michael R. Matthews, p. 195”

Nowhere in the Gospel do we read that the Lord said: "I am sending you a Paraclete who will teach you about the course of the sun and moon ." For He wanted to make Christians , not mathematicians .

“The Heavenly City outshines Rome, beyond comparison. There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity.”

The City of God(early 400s) | Book II, Chapter 29

“Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.”

De doctrina christiana | 1:28:29 English Latin Latin: Sed cum omnibus prodesse non possis, his potissimum consulendum est, qui pro locorum et temporum vel quarumlibet rerum opportunitatibus constrictius tibi quasi quadam sort

“I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.”

Greek Exercises (1888); at the age of fifteen, Russell used to write down his reflections in this book, for fear that his people should find out what he was thinking.

“Greek Exercises (1888); at the age of fifteen, Russell used to write down his reflections in this book, for fear that his people should find out what he was thinking.”

I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness.

“Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.”

Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894). Smith was a Quaker, thus the archaic use of "Thee" in this and other letters to her.

“Thee might observe incidentally that if the state paid for child-bearing it might and ought to require a medical certificate that the parents were such as to give a reasonable result of a healthy child – this would afford a very good inducement to some sort of care for the race, and gradually as public opinion became educated by the law, it might react on the law and make that more stringent, until one got to some state of things in which there would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways.”

Letter to Alys Pearsall Smith (1894); published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1: The Private Years (1884–1914) , edited by Nicholas Griffin. It should be noted that in his talk of "the race", he is referring to "the human race". Smith married Russell in December 1894; they divorced in 1921.

“Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.”

Our Knowledge of the External World(1914) | p. 167

“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”

Volume iii, p. 274

“Justice was in all countries originally administered by the priesthood; nor indeed could laws in their first feeble state have either authority or sanction, so as to compel men to relinquish their natural independence, had they not appeared to come down to them enforced by beings of more than human power. The first openings of civility have been everywhere made by religion. Amongst the Romans, the”

An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757– c . 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 196

“In the interval between his campaigns Agricola was employed in the great labours of peace. He knew that the general must be perfected by the legislator; and that the conquest is neither permanent nor honourable, which is only an introduction to tyranny... In short, he subdued the Britons by civilizing them; and made them exchange a savage liberty for a polite and easy subjection. His conduct is th”

An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757– c . 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 215

“These principles it is necessary strictly to attend to, because they will serve much to explain the whole course both of government and real property, wherever the German nations obtained a settlement; the whole of their government depending for the most part upon two principles in our nature,—ambition, that makes one man desirous, at any hazard or expense, of taking the lead amongst others; and a”

An Essay towards an Abridgment of English History (1757– c . 1763), quoted in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI (1856), p. 282

Attributed to Edmund Burke:

“Society is indeed a contract, between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

As quoted in The Communist Manifesto (1848), p.2

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”

The Communist Manifesto, 1848

“In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.”

Das Kapital(Buch I)(1867) | Vol. I, Ch. 17, Section IV, pg. 581.

“History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.”

1840s | The Holy Family , Ch. VI (1845).

“As for the commercial business, I can no longer make head or tail of it. At one moment crisis seems imminent and the City prostrated, the next everything is set fair. I know that none of this will have any impact on the catastrophe.”

1850s | Letter to Friedrich Engels (4 February 1852), quoted in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Volume 39. Letters 1852–55 (2010), p. 32

“A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.”

Un homme heureux est trop content du présent pour trop se soucier de l'avenir.

“From "Mes Projets d'Avenir", a French essay written at age 18 for a school exam (18 September 1896). The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein Vol. 1 (1987) Doc. 22.”

Un homme heureux est trop content du présent pour trop se soucier de l'avenir.

“Who would have thought around 1900 that in fifty years time we would know so much more and understand so much less.”

Albert Einstein: A guide for the perplexed(1979) | From Albert Einstein and the Cosmic World Order , by C. Lanczos (Wiley, New York, 1956)

“I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share; it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”

1955 | [Words he used to refuse heart surgery the day before he passed away.] Einsteins Legacy: The Final Chapter, Albert Einstein dies soon after a blood vessel bursts near his heart. American Museum of Nat

“It seems hard to sneak a look at God's cards. But that He plays dice and uses "telepathic" methods... is something that I cannot believe for a single moment.”

Albert Einstein: The Human Side(1979) | Letter to Cornel Lanczos (21 March 1942), p. 68

“Vivekananda, The Future of India, Complete works vol 3.”

This is the ancient land where wisdom made its home before it went into any other country, the same India whose influx of spirituality is represented, as it were, on the material plane, by rolling rivers like oceans, where the eternal Himalayas, rising tier above tier with their snowcaps, look as it were into the very mysteries of heaven. Here is the same India whose soil has been trodden by the f

“The highest truth is this: God is present in all beings. They are His multiple forms. There is no other God to seek. . . . It is a man-making religion that we want. . . . Give up these weakening mysticisms, and be strong. . . . For the next fifty years. ... let all other gods disappear from our minds. This is the only God that is awake, our own race, everywhere His hands, everywhere His feet, everywhere His ears; He covers everything. . . . The first of all worships is the worship of those all around us. ... He alone serves God who serves all other beings.”

Quoted from Will Durant , Our Oriental Heritage.

“And may I ask you, Europeans, what country you have ever raised to better conditions? Wherever you have found weaker races, you have exterminated them by the roots, as it were. You have settled on their lands and they are gone forever. What is the history of your America, your Australia and New Zealand, your Pacific Islands and South Africa? Where are those aboriginal races there today? They are all exterminated, you have killed them outright, as if they were wild beasts. It is only where you have not the power to do so, and there only, that other nations are still alive.”

Swami Vivekananda Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

“All truth is eternal . Truth is nobody’s property; no race, no individual can lay any exclusive claim to it. Truth is the nature of all souls.”

Pearls of Wisdom

“Go on saying, “I am free.” Never mind if the next moment delusion comes and says, “I am bound.” Dehypnotize the whole thing.”

Pearls of Wisdom

“Annexing of the land in Crimea, I think, was a criminal act. But it has a history.”

2016 | Noam Chomsky, Al Jazeera ‘UpFront’ interview with host Mehdi Hasan on ISIL, Turkey and Ukraine, (Jan 23, 2016)

“There's a good reason why nobody studies history. It just teaches you too much.”

2003 | KGNU benefit at the University of Colorado at Boulder , April 5, 2003 (context: João Goulart ) [71]

“[…] the evacuation of Phnom Penh , widely denounced at the time and since for its undoubted brutality, may actually have saved many lives.”

After the Cataclysm(1979)

“In "Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics" by Paul Street [99] , 2008.”

2007–09

“In these tumultuous times, Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance & Rebellion is important, because a functioning democracy requires active citizen participation in setting social policy.”

Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance & Rebellion(2020)

“The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”

On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

“My Own Four Walls” (c. 1825) Froude, James Anthony (1882). Thomas Carlyle: A history of the first forty years of his life, 1795-1835 . p. 189. OCLC 603024 .”

Not all his men may sever this, It yields to friends ', not monarchs ', calls; My whinstone house my castle is — I have my own four walls.

“Great men are the inspired (speaking and acting) texts of that divine Book of Revelations, wherof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.”

Sartor Resartus(1833–1834) | Bk. II, ch. 8.

“As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden — "Speech is silvern, Silence is golden"; or, as I might rather express it: speech is of time, silence is of eternity.”

Sartor Resartus(1833–1834) | Bk. III, ch. 3.

“Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.”

Sir Walter Scott(1838)

“Tell me you stones, O speak, you towering palaces ! Streets, say a word! Spirit of this place, are you dumb? All things are alive in your sacred walls Eternal Rome, it's only for me all is still.”

Roman Elegies(1789) | Elegy 1

“What dazzles, for the Moment spends its spirit: What's genuine, shall Posterity inherit.”

Faust, Part 1(1808) | Prelude on the Stage

“Everything that liberates our mind without at the same time imparting self-control is pernicious.”

Maxims and Reflections(1833) | Maxim 504, trans. Stopp Variant translation: Everything that emancipates the spirit without giving us control over ourselves is harmful.

“The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity.”

Elective Affinities(1809) | Bk. I, Ch. 9

“Let us live in as small a circle as we will, we are either debtors or creditors before we have had time to look round.”

Elective Affinities(1809) | Bk. II, Ch. 4

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Tao Te Ching, Chapter 64

“Those about whom you inquire have moulded with their bones into dust. Nothing but their words remain. When the hour of the great man has struck he rises to leadership; but before his time has come he is hampered in all that he attempts. I have heard that the successful merchant carefully conceals his wealth, and acts as though he had nothing—that the great man, though abounding in achievements, is simple in his manners and appearance. Get rid of your pride and your many ambitions, your affectation and your extravagant aims. Your character gains nothing for all these. This is my advice to you.”

Attributed to Laozi. Laozi speaking to Confucius. Quoted in James Legge, Texts of Taoism, 34; Quoted from Will Durant , Our Oriental Heritage .

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery .”

Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English (1972)

“The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnameable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding .”

interpreted by Stephen Mitchell (1992)

“The tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be spoken is not the eternal Name. The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of creation. Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery. By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real. Yet mystery and reality emerge from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness born from darkness. The beginning of all understanding.”

translated by J.H.McDonald (1996)

“The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.”

p. 133.

“Logical empiricism holds the view, notwithstanding some its assertions, that the forms of knowledge and consequently the relations of man to nature and to other men never change. According to rationalism, too, all subjective and objective potentialities are rooted in insights which the individual already possesses, but rationality uses existing objects as well as the active inner striving and ideas of man to construct standards for the future. In this regard, it is not so closely associated with the present order as is empiricism .”

p. 148.

“Leibniz’s theory on the subject as substantia ideans in the sense of a causative agent of decision and acts stands much closer to a materialist interpretation of history than does a philosophy which reduces the thinking subject to the role of subsuming protocol sentences under general propositions and deducing other sentences from them.”

p. 149.

“Long after Plato’s time the concept of the Ideas still represented the sphere of aloofness, independence, and in a certain sense even freedom, an objectivity that did not submit to ‘our’ interests.”

Eclipse of Reason(1947) | p. 46.

Attributed to Max Horkheimer:

“What is at stake is not the conservation of the past, but the redemption of the hopes of the past.”

“According to their nature, there are both people who have quick intelligence, and those who must withdraw and take time to think things over.”

Wikiquote

“Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: "Matters of great concern should be treated lightly." Master lttei commented, "Matters of small concern should be treated seriously." Among one's affairs there should not be more than two or three matters of what one could call great concern. If these are deliberated upon during ordinary times, they can be understood. Thinking about things previously and then handling them lightly when the time comes is what this is all about.”

Wikiquote

“The way of revenge lies in simply forcing one's way into a place and being cut down. There is no shame in this. By thinking that you must complete the job you will run out of time. By considering things like how many men the enemy has, time piles up; in the end you will give up. No matter if the enemy has thousands of men, there is fulfillment in simply standing them off and being determined to cut them all down, starting from one end. You will finish the greater part of it.”

Wikiquote

“Concerning the night assault of Lord Asano's ronin, the fact that they did not commit seppuku at the Sengakuji was an error, for there was a long delay between the time their lord was struck down and the time when they struck down the enemy. If Lord Kira had died of illness within that period, it would have been extremely regrettable.”

Commentary on the tale of The Forty-Seven Samurai (or the "Forty-seven Ronin ", or Akō Rōshi , the Akō "vendetta"), emphasizing his view that Bushido demands prompt action, and not delay, or concern about success and failure. Variant: "What if, nine months after Asano's death, Kira had died of an illness?

“There is not a man who does not get senile by the time he reaches sixty. And when one thinks that he will not be senile, he is already so.”

Hagakure(c. 1716)

“Should there not be manifest progress and development but in a higher sense than people have imagined it? ... No one is in his age alone , he builds on the preceding one , this becomes nothing but the foundation of the future , wants to be nothing but that — this is what we are told by the analogy in nature , God ’s speaking exemplary model in all works ! Manifestly so in the human species !”

This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity" [" Auch eine Philosophie zur Geschichte der Menscheit "] (1774), as translated by Michael N. Forster, in Johann Gottlieb von Herder: Philosophical Writings (2002), edited by Michael N. Forster, p. 299

“This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity" [" Auch eine Philosophie zur Geschichte der Menscheit "] (1774), as translated by Michael N. Forster, in Johann Gottlieb von Herder: Philosophical Writings (2002), edited by Michael N. Forster, p. 299”

Should there not be manifest progress and development but in a higher sense than people have imagined it? ... No one is in his age alone , he builds on the preceding one , this becomes nothing but the foundation of the future , wants to be nothing but that — this is what we are told by the analogy in nature , God ’s speaking exemplary model in all works ! Manifestly so in the human species !

“With the greatest possible solicitude avoid authorship. Too early or immoderately employed, it makes the head waste and the heart empty; even were there no other worse consequences. A person, who reads only to print, to all probability reads amiss ; and he, who sends away through the pen and the press every thought, the moment it occurs to him, will in a short time have sent all away, and will become a mere journeyman of the printing-office, a compositor .”

Am sorgfältigsten, mein Freund, meiden Sie die Autorschaft darüber. Zu früh oder unmäßig gebraucht, macht sie den Kopf wüste und das Herz leer, wenn sie auch sonst keine üblen Folgen gäbe. Ein Mensch, der die Bibel nur lieset, um sie zu erläutern, lieset sie wahrscheinlich übel, und wer jeden Gedanken, der ihm aufstößt, durch Feder und Presse versendet, hat sie in kurzer Zeit alle versandt, und wi

“in Suzanne L. Marchand - German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship-Cambridge University Press (2009)”

In his later work, in particular, he voices considerable animus against British colonization in India; in his 1803 preface to a new edition of Forster’s Sakuntala, he says that “English rhyme schemes suit Indian poetry as searing-hot water acts on the sweet blooms of the Mallika, which singe and destroy them (as the English do the Hindus themselves),” and deplores the fact that “‘this cultural and

“Herder, quoted in Poliakov, L. (1974). The Aryan myth : a history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe p 186”

Wikiquote

“People here argue about religion interminably, but it appears that they are competing at the same time to see who can be the least devout.”

Lettres Persanes(Persian Letters, 1721) | No. 46. (Usbek writing to Rhedi)

“History is full of religious wars; but, we must take care to observe, it was not the multiplicity of religions that produced these wars, it was the intolerating spirit which animated that one which thought she had the power of governing.”

Lettres Persanes(Persian Letters, 1721) | No. 65. (Usbek writing to his wives)

“I acknowledge that history is full of religious wars : but we must distinguish; it is not the multiplicity of religions which has produced wars; it is the intolerant spirit animating that which believed itself in the ascendant.”

Lettres Persanes(Persian Letters, 1721) | No. 86. (Usbek writing to Mirza)

“Commonly paraphrased as "An author is a fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on boring future generations".”

Lettres Persanes(Persian Letters, 1721)

Attributed to Montesquieu:

“The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.”

“Empire is emerging today as the center that supports the globalization of productive networks and casts its widely inclusive net to try to envelop all power relations within its world order — and yet at the same time it deploys a powerful police function against the new barbarians and the rebellious slaves who threaten its order.”

(20)

“Philosophy is not the owl of Minerva that takes flight after history has been realized in order to celebrate its happy ending; rather, philosophy is subjective proposition, desire, and praxis that are applied to the event.”

(49)

“Reality and history, however, are not dialectical, and no idealist rhetorical gymnastics can make them conform to the dialect.”

(131)

“We share bodies with two eyes, ten fingers, ten toes; we share life on this earth; we share capitalist regimes of production and exploitation; we share common dreams of a better future.”

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire | (128)

“The possibility of democracy on a global scale is emerging today for the very first time.”

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire | (xi)

“[T]here is a path of ascent, requiring and enabling us to undergo a transformation of both society and the self, and rewarding us with an incomparable good. The incomparable good is a greater share of the attributes of the divine, or eternal life, or a greater life, with higher powers, making us more godlike.”

p. 121 (explaining the religious tradition Unger calls "struggling with the world")

“By the structure of society, I mean the institutional and ideological presuppositions that shape the routine practices, conflicts, and transactions in that society, and that are largely taken for granted, even to the point of being invisible, as if they were part of the nature of things. In a free society, this institutional and ideological framework does not present itself as an alien fate beyond the reach of the transformative will and imagination.”

p. 295

“In history obedience rarely pays; what pays is defiance.”

p. 8

“A democratic experimentalist will not stand waiting for the next magical moment. Rather than have us be crowned by history, he will insist that we crown ourselves.”

What Should Legal Analysis Become?(1996) | p. 20

“There is no permanent canon of forms of normative argument. Our ways of arguing about ideals are, like our other practices, the mutable products of a specific history and the expressions of our ideas about society and thought.”

False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy(1987) | p. 361

“Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.”

Politics as a Vocation

“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.”

Science as a Vocation

“Max Weber, General Economic History , trans. by Frank Knight , 1961. p 265”

Since Judaism made Christianity possible and gave it the character of a religion essentially free from magic, it rendered an important service from the point of view of economic history. For the dominance of magic outside the sphere in which Christianity has prevailed in one of the most serious obstructions to the rationalization of economic life. Magic involves a stereotyping of technology and ec

“No sociologist , for instance, should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time”

From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology(1946) | p. 135 (in 2009 edition)

“"Rationalism" is a historical concept that contains within itself a world of contradictions.”

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism(1905; 1920) | Ch. 2 : The "Spirit" of Capitalism

“We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.”

The Idolatry of Politics", U.S. Jefferson Lecture speech (1986)

“Communism was not the crazy fantasy of a few fanatics, nor the result of human stupidity and baseness; it was a real, very real part of the history of the twentieth century , and we cannot understand this history of ours without understanding communism. We cannot get rid of this specter by saying it was just “human stupidity,” or “human corruptibility.” The specter is stronger than the spells we cast on it. It might come back to life.”

Introduction to My Correct Views on Everything

“The history of utopias is no less fascinating than the history of metallurgy or of chemical engineering.”

Main Currents Of Marxism(1978) | New Preface, p. vi

“It seems to us that the past is our property. Well, on the contrary — we are its property, because we are not able to make changes in it, while it fills the whole of our existence.”

Original: "Otóż przeciwnie – to my jesteśmy jej własnością, ponieważ nie jesteśmy w stanie dokonać w niej zmian, ona natomiast wypełnia całość naszego istnienia." Klucz niebieski albo opowieści biblijne zebrane ku pouczeniu i przestrodze

“The cultural atmosphere of Russia in those years had an adolescent quality, common to all periods of revolution: the belief that life is just beginning, that the future is unlimited, and that mankind is no longer bound by the shackles of history. (pg. 47)”

Three Volume edition

“Normal science means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements.”

p. 10

“I suggest that scientific knowledge, though logically more articulate and far more complex, is of this sort. The books and teachers from whom it is acquired present concrete examples together with a multitude of theoretical generalizations. Both are essential carriers of knowledge, and it is therefore Pickwickian to seek a methodological criterion that supposes the scientist can specify in advance whether each imaginable instance fits or would falsify his theory.”

Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (1970)

“Somehow, the practice of astronomy, physics, chemistry or biology normally fails to evoke the controversies over fundamentals that today seem endemic among, say, psychologists or sociologists. Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called “paradigms.” These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners.”

p. xiii (2012 ed.)

“History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.”

Wikiquote

“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.”

p. 5

“The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.”

Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter I, as translated by Arthur Mitchell (1911), p. 14.; italicized in the original.

“I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind , however simple , that does not change every moment .”

An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), translated by T. E. Hulme . New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912, p. 44

“All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant , man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity , in space and in time , is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death .”

Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter III. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, p. 271

“The spectacle of what religions have been in the past, of what certain religions still are to-day, is indeed humiliating for human intelligence. What a farrago of error and folly!'”

The Two Sources of Morality and Religion(1932) | Chapter II : Static Religion

Attributed to Henri Bergson:

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”