Wisdom comes from disillusionment.
In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else.
Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled.
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.
To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word – the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.
A musical education is necessary for musical judgement. What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills.
Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything.
My soul hates the fool whose only passion is to live by rule.
Columbus gave the world another world.
It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.
Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.
Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.
Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp.
Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely.
Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.
Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.