Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.