The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.
If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine...
Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.
Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man’s charter of nobility.
It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
The unforgivable sin is the refusal to pardon.
Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.
A simple life is its own reward.
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.
There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he.
It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.
I have no axe to grind; only my thoughts to burnish.
Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.