Quote collection
471 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness."
"Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love."
"The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil."
"Nothing is so irrevocable as mind."
"Memory... is an internal rumor."
"All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg."
"Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths."
"Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason."
"To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired."
"Beware of long arguments and long beards."
"There is no right government except good government."
"What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water."
"It is the acme of life to understand life."
"The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism."
"Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much."
"Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate."
"The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding."
"We do right enough darling, if we go wrong together."
"To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful."
"Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture."