A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words.
Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.
Given a fair chance, human beings can govern themselves, and govern themselves better.
Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer.
No holiday is ever anything but a disappointment.
Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.
The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.
Real progress is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto.
If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay – in solid cash – the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
Somewhere in the rain, there will always be an abandoned dog that prevents you from being happy.
The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture-ground where all may graze, and where the more bite, the longer the grass grows, the sweeter is its flavor, and the more it nourishes.
Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!
Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.
One right-thinking man thinks like all other right-thinking men of his time that is to say, in most cases, like some wrong-thinking man of another time.
Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London.
My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists ; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism .
It is only when it takes the form of physical addiction that sex is evil. It is also evil when it manifests itself as a way of satisfying the lust for power or the climber’s craving for position and social distinction.
At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?
The indispensible is not necessarily the desirable.