"I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty"
"The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication"
"The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer"
"Oaths are the fossils of piety"
"It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to"
"In Greece wise men speak and fools decide"
"The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity"
"When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different"
"The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings"
"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"
"History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there"
"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"
"That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject"
"The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany"
"Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body"
"Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others"
"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 no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval"
"There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far"
"The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise"
"The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art"
"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"
"The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy"
"The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool"
"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"
"The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas"
"The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism"
"The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal"
"Sanity is madness put to good use"
"Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace"
"Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end"
"Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much"
"Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up"
"Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself"
"Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality"
"Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies"
"All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato"
"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"
"Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better"
