Verbal ability is a highly overrated thing in a guy, and it's our pathetic need for it that gets us into so much trouble.
No truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endowed with thought and reason as well as men.
No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.
The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny; flattery to treachery; standing armies to arbitrary government; and the glory of God to the temporal interest of the clergy.
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.
Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are the true sources of superstition. Hope, pride, presumption, a warm indignation, together with ignorance, are the true sources of enthusiasm.
Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds on which it is commonly founded.
My own view is that Kant's conception of the duality of the good (morality and happiness, the good of our person and the good of our state or condition) is a distinctively modern view.
I've seen neighborhoods that I would have never driven though because I'm riding my bike, because I'm looking for side roads, looking for maybe more hills or less hills depending if I'm exercising or not. You see a lot more, and you get the flow of a city a lot more.
genius must ever be imperfect. Life is not long enough nor slow enough for both brain and character to grow side by side to superhuman proportions.
If you don't take care of this the most magnificent machine that you will ever be given. . . where are you going to live?