Man relates to material things through direct insight rather than reason.

Most men use their knowledge only under guidance from others because they lack the courage to think independently using their own reasoning abilities. It takes intellectual daring to discover the truth.

Two things strike me dumb: the infinite starry heavens, and the sense of right and wrong in man.

The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty.

A society that is not willing to demand a life of somebody who has taken somebody else’s life is simply immoral.