There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.
Memory itself is an internal rumour.
The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.
Fear first created the gods.
People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.
A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.
Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
There is no dunce like a mature dunce.
You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams.
Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.
Docility is the observable half of reason.
To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of its content.
Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.
Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.
Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.
To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.
The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.