The old question of whether there is design is idle. The real question is what is the world, whether or not it have a designer--and that can be revealed only by the study of all nature's particulars.

What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!

Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know.

If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them exclusively, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.

Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

In modern eyes, precious though wars may be they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, is a war now thought permissible.