“Sanity is a madness put to good uses.”

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

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.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness

Memory... is an internal rumor.

“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”

“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.”

“Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.”

“Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.”

“The wisest mind has something yet to learn.”

“love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.”

“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”

“We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”

“To know your future you must know your past”

“Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.”

“The bible is literature, not dogma.”

“To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.”

“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.”

“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”

“A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.”

“The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.”

“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”

“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. . . . History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten”

“The worship of power is an old religion.”

“Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”

“An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”

“why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.”

“I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.”

“Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.”

“The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.”

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.”

“That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”

“The earth has its music for those who will listen.”

“The man who is not permitted to own is owned.”

“A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.”

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

“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”

“A habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and the impression that has not learned to express itself--all of which are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible soul.”

“Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.”

“One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”

“Consciousness is a born hermit.”

“The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.”

“The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.”