"In the Middle Ages, everything bad was the work of the devil, everything good, the work of God. Today, the French see everything in reverse and blame the Germans for it."

José Rizal Politics See all quotes by José Rizal →

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“Law has no skin, reason has no nostrils.”

“The world laughs at another man's pain.”

“Genius has no country. It blossoms everywhere. Genius is like the light, the air. It is the heritage of all.”

“Virtue lies in the middle ground.”

“No, let us not make God in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a distant planet lost in infinite space. However brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light.”

“Truth does not need to borrow garments from error.”

Resonant Thoughts

"People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing."

— Ernest Gellner

Philosophy1925–1995

#religion

"Man, when he is in health and order of soul and body, is Mount Olympus, and in him, so long as he confesses that he is nothing in himself, are sensibly apparent the powers and majesties, beauties and …"

— Coventry Patmore

Literature1823–1896

#religion

"In dreams you sometimes fall from a height, or are stabbed, or beaten, but you never feel pain unless, perhaps, you really bruise yourself against the bedstead, then you feel pain and almost always wa…"

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Literature1871–1922

#hope

"Book publishing was never a heaven “run by editors”, and it is by no means today a hell “run by accountants.” If our “sole interest” was “instant profit,” not only would we never do any number of the …"

— Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Literature1959

#friendship