Quote collection
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"Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life."
"History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion."
"What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?"
"By "essence" I understand a universal, of any degree of complexity and definition, which may be given immediately, whether to sense or to thought.... This object of pure sense or pure thought, with no belief superadded, an object inwardly complete and individual, but without external relations or physical status, is what I call an essence."
"Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence."
"It is true that I am carrying out various methods of treatment recommended by doctors and dentists in the hope of dying in the remote future in perfect health."
"When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains."
"Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be."
"The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality."
"All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death."
"Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice."
"Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods."
"The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt."
"If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation."
"Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things."
"The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him."
"To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so."
"Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble."
"Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come."
"The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words."