As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends.
Each religion necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. Religions, like languages, are necessary rivals. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.
The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things...
Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.
Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience – the union of life and peace.
Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.
The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men’s minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.
The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence.
The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
A friend’s only gift is himself.
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.