Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
