Quote collection
471 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp."
"why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together."
"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."
"A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within."
"Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition."
"America is a young country with an old mentality."
"Music is essentially useless, as is life."
"The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy."
"The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations."
"The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others."
"The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk."
"It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true."
"Sometimes we have to change the truth in order to remember it."
"Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy."
"What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art ."
"The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred."
"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."
"Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience."
"Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood."
"Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end."