FridayMay 16, 2025
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
Sanity is a madness put to good use.
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
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.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
Prejudice is a great time saver. It enables you to form opinions without bothering to get the facts.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
Men have fiendishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell only to find it ridiculous.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies.
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots.
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.
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.
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
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.
Music is esentially useless, as is life.
Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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.
Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
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.
There is no right government except good government.
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
The family is one of natures masterpieces.
To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.
Nothing is so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience the union of life and peace.
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
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.
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experience.
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
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