Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.
Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel.
It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.
Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends.
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.
It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.
Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor's chair.
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?
Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.
In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility.
For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.