Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
The degree in which a poet’s imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
Music is essentially useless, as is life.
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
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.