FridaySep 25, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experience.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
The profoundest affinities are the most readily felt; they remain a background and standard for all happiness and if we trace them out we succeed.
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience the union of life and peace.
Nothing is so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.
The family is one of natures masterpieces.
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
There is no right government except good government.
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.
Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs.
Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Music is esentially useless, as is life.
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 must rest on circumstantial evidence.
A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies.
Men have fiendishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell only to find it ridiculous.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
Prejudice is a great time saver. It enables you to form opinions without bothering to get the facts.
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
Sanity is a madness put to good use.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
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