Why should I ask the wise men: Whence is my beginning? I am busy with the thought: Where will be my end?

Why hast thou made me born in this country, The inhabitant of which is satisfied with being a slave?

If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.

From your past emerges the present, and from the present is born your future.

Though the terror of the sea gives to none security, in the secret of the shell. Self preserving we may dwell.

The intellect of two thousand asses cannot bring forth a single man's thought.

The spirit of philosophy is one of free inquiry. It suspects all authority. Its function is to trace the uncritical assumptions of human thought to their hiding places, and in this pursuit it may finally end in denial or a frank admission of the incapacity of pure reason to reach the ultimate reality.