Show me your achievement, and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.
Consider the reasons which make us certain that we are right, but not the fact that we are certain. If you are not convinced, ignore our certainty. Don’t be tempted to substitute our judgment for your own.
Live a life as a monument to your soul.
Professional intellectuals are the voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators and its bodyguards.
Ideas cannot be fought except by means of better ideas. The battle consists, not of opposing, but of exposing; not of denouncing, but of disproving; not of evading, but of boldly proclaiming a full, consistent, and radical alternative.
Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character.
A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition.
Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival.
A house can have integrity, just like a person.
Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach.
Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.
All work is an act of philosophy.
If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.
I am a man who does not exist for others.
It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary.
Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will break through.
Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion.
The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves – or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.