The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm’s length.
What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art .
I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me.
The living have never shown me how to live.
It is not society’s fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.
Though the heart wear the garment of its sorrow And be not happy like a naked star, Yet from the thought of peace some peace we borrow, Some rapture from the rapture felt afar.
In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.
Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.
Beauty is objectified pleasure.
American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.
An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities.
People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.
For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.