Quote collection
471 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality....The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral."
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it."
"We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms."
"The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything."
"To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman."
"Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world."
"Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end."
"The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world."
"The family is one of nature's masterpieces."
"Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled."
"It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas."
"If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk."
"Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others."
"The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas."
"Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility."
"Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome."
"The Bible is literature, not dogma."
"There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books."
"If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics."
"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."