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.
There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man’s wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.
Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.