Action can give us the feeling of being useful, but only words can give us a sense of weight and purpose.
Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.
Unpredictability, too, can become monotonous.
Quite often in history action has been the echo of words. An era of talk was followed by an era of events. The new barbarism of the twentieth century is the echo of words bandied about by brilliant speakers and writers in the second half of the nineteenth.
There is apparently no surer way of turning a thing into its opposite than by exaggerating it.
In a trader-dominated society, the scribe is usually kept out of the management of affairs, but it given a more or less free hand in the cultural field. By frustrating the scribe’s craving for commanding action, the trader draws upon himself the scribe’s wrath and scorn.
Whoever originated the cliche that money is the root of all evil knew hardly anything about the nature of evil and very little about human beings.
No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments.
We can never have enough of that which we do not want.
Children, savages and true believers remember far less what they have seen than what they have heard.
Radicalism itself ceases to be radical when absorbed mainly in preserving its control over a society or an economy.
The purpose of philosophers is to show people what is right under their noses.
When the Greeks said, Whom the gods love die young, they probably meant, as Lord Sankey suggested, that those favored by the gods stay young till the day they die; young and playful.
A plant needs roots in order to grow. With man it is the other way around: only when he grows does he have roots and feels at home in the world.
One of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does.
However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing.
When we are in competition with ourselves, and match our todays against our yesterdays, we derive encouragement from past misfortunes and blemishes. Moreover, the competition with ourselves leaves unimpaired our benevolence toward our fellow men.
A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed.
The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents.
Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story – a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.