I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters.
There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.
Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age.
Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.
In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
Man’s most serious activity is play.
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.
Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
There is no right government except good government.
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.