Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.
Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.
Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility
The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine That lights the pathway but one step ahead Across a void of mystery and dread.
To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so.
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.
Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.
Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.
There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.
Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.
The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.
Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.
Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.
Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.
The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.
Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.
Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them
Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.