Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.
It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination.
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies.
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.
What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavour to understand him.
Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.
Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.
Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.