Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
By nature’s kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man’s power to answer do not occur to him at all.
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.
Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
The profoundest affinities are the most readily felt; they remain a background and standard for all happiness and if we trace them out we succeed.
I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies.
Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.