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There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man - that is, the more divine - the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.
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Everything that exalts and expands consciousness is good, while that which depresses and diminishes it is evil.
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And usually the philosopher philosophizes either in order to resign himself to life, or to seek some finality in it, or to distract himself and forget his griefs, or for pastime and amusement.
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The supreme triumph of reason is to cast doubt upon its own validity.
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My religion is searching for the truth in life and life in the truth, though knowing that I do not have to find it while I live; my religion is fighting incessantly and tirelessly with the unknown.
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Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though life may issue from them.
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Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.
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Sow the living part of yourselves in the furrow of life.
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The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule.
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That which the Fascists hate above all else, is intelligence.
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The devil is an angel too.
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Consciousness is a disease.
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All knowledge has an ultimate goal. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but a dismal begging of the question.
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The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.
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The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.
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Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly - but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.
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Is there anything more terrible than a "call"? It affords an occasion for the exchange of the most threadbare commonplaces. Calls and the theatre are the two great centers for the propagation of platitudes.
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Those faults we do not have, do not bother us.
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Yes, yes, I see it all! — an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist — for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?
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Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.
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If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.
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He who loves his neighbor burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood, groans when it burns, and distills itself in tears. There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist.
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Knowledge for the sake of knowledge! Truth for truth's sake! This is inhuman.
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Chemistry ought to be not for chemists alone.