Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.
To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.
In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.
It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.
The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.
A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.
All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.
The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.
Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.
Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.
The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams.
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely.
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.
The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes.
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things.
Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.
Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.
A musical education is necessary for musical judgement. What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills.
... so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected; it is recognised and obeyed.
Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.
The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
Those who cannot remember the pastare condemned to repeat it. or: Those who have never heard of good system development practice are condemned to reinvent it.
It is true that I am carrying out various methods of treatment recommended by doctors and dentists in the hope of dying in the remote future in perfect health.
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of its content.
Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.
The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.
All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.