WednesdaySep 30, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Even the most scientific investigator in science, the most thoroughgoing Positivist, cannot dispense with fiction; he must at least make use of categories, and they are already fictions, analogical fictions, or labels, which give us the same pleasure as children receive when they are told the 'name' of a thing.
Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money. and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.
What we call 'progress' is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man's or woman's body, is the pattern of all the process of our life.
The sun and the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago ... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.
In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.
The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.
A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.
What we call 'morals' is simply blind obedience to words of command.
To make a mountain of a mole-hill.
If men and women are to understand each other, to enter into each other's nature with mutual sympathy, and to become capable of genuine comradeship, the foundation must be laid in youth.
It is here [in mathematics] that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.
The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.
The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
Had there been a lunatic asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on a pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could but have confirmed the diagnosis.
To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.
One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take.
The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities.... A life is beautiful and ideal or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship.
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.
There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself.
All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
The byproduct is sometimes more valuable than the product.
The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.
The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum.
Every artist writes his own autobiography.
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
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