Then shoulder to shoulder! Let us engirdle the little circle of the earth with the chains that bind us to each other. To one end let us aim our thoughts, and to one end let us aim our souls. Hail, dawn of liberty, behind thee is the redeeming sun.
Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.
I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament. This is also necessary for all people.
I don't know if I've ever been in a clique. The older I've gotten, the more I've realized what a true friend really is. So my friendship circle has changed a bit.
You ought to love all mankind; nay, every individual of mankind. You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circles less, but to love those who exist beyond it more.
Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle.
The thing that has disturbed me most about the Russian hacking episode is - and the thing that surprised me most has not been the fact of Russian hacking. The cyber world is full of information gathering, you know, propaganda, et cetera. I have been concerned about the degree to which, in some circles, you've seen people suggest that Vladimir Putin has more credibility than the U.S. government. I think that's something new.
In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity - or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity - by being opinionated rather than by being learned.