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.
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.