When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
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.
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
To know your future you must know your past.
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
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.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
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 wisest mind has something yet to learn.
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
The bible is literature, not dogma.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
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.
Memory... is an internal rumor.
Love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
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.
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.
Habit is stronger than reason.
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
