Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
The Ethic of Freethought (Mar 6, 1883)
Remarks after the Solvay Conference (1927)
Context: I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.
“I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.”
Source: The Collector
“Even if religion and morality are dismissed as illusion, the word "Ought" still has sway.”
Science and the Unseen World (1929)
“Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer”
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
Fluther Good, Act 1
The Plough and the Stars (1926)
Source: Constitutional Code; For the Use All Nations and All Governments Professing Liberal Opinions Volume 1
“Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”
Variant: We know what we are, but not what we may be.
Source: King Lear
Source: Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen (1971), p. 52
