Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
In any close society it is more urgent to restrain others than to be free oneself. Hence the tendency for the central authority to absorb and supersede such as are local or delegated.
Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.
There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor’s chair.
The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine That lights the pathway but one step ahead Across a void of mystery and dread.
A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel.
The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.
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.