I no longer desire happiness: life is nobler than that.
The man who has never made a mistake will never make anything else.
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
Gardening is the only unquestionably useful job.
The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing.
People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.
When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.
If you eliminate smoking and gambling, you will be amazed to find that almost all an Englishman’s pleasures can be, and mostly are, shared by his dog.
Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.
Our first duty is not to be poor.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.
Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
Emotional excitement reaches men through tea, tobacco, opium, whisky, and religion.
Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.
And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
The most sincere form of love is love for food.