My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.

The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.

When I recall today my early youth, I should take the boy that I then was, with the exception of a few individual features, for a different person, were it not for the existence of the chain of memories.

Thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combinations of the elements, - the colours, sounds, and so forth - nothing apart from their so-called attributes.

Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself.

Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view.

The presentations and conceptions of the average man of the world are formed and dominated, not by the full and pure desire for knowledge as an end in itself, but by the struggle to adapt himself favourably to the conditions of life.

The biological task of science is to provide the fully developed human individual with as perfect a means of orientating himself as possible. No other scientific ideal can be realised, and any other must be meaningless.

Science always has its origin in the adaptation of thought to some definite field of experience.

A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth.

A movement that we will to execute is never more than a represented movement, and appears in a different domain from that of the executed movement, which always takes place when the image is vivid enough.

Personally, people know themselves very poorly.

The task which we have set ourselves is simply to show why and for what purpose we hold that standpoint during most of our lives, and why and for what purpose we are provisionally obliged to abandon it.

My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.

Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.

If our dreams were more regular, more connected, more stable, they would also have more practical importance for us.

Similarly, many a young man, hearing for the first time of the refraction of stellar light, has thought that doubt was cast on the whole of astronomy, whereas nothing is required but an easily effected and unimportant correction to put everything right again.

The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind.

Without renouncing the support of physics, it is possible for the physiology of the senses, not only to pursue its own course of development, but also to afford to physical science itself powerful assistance.

Ordinarily pleasure and pain are regarded as different from sensations.

The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies.

Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right.

In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture.

All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.

This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.

It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

Lives of great men oft remind us as we o'er their pages turn, That we too may leave behind us - Letters that we ought to burn.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don't believe too much into inspiration, only I'm waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It's a little too easy to say that.

When families observe a later, deeper stage of cult involvement they may find it necessary to consider the involvement of a professional such as myself in an intervention effort.

Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Some gods may cross your path, but why should gods be beautiful? They could also be frightening.

A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.

What I'm suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.

People may take a job for more money, but they often leave it for more recognition.

No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be, can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal.

As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable.

As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.

But the Congress has made the determination that certain kinds of information can be protected even though the American people may want to have access to information.

It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance toward it, though we know it can never be reached.

Since love first made the breast an instrument Of fierce lamenting, by its flame my heart Was molten to a mirror, like a rose I pluck my breast apart, that I may hang This mirror in your sight.