What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.
Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards.
To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.
The highest and noblest thing that history can be is a good story.
I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether pigs can fly; we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it.
The hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded.
The most important fact about the subject of education is that there is no such thing. Education is not a subject and it does not deal in subjects. It is instead the transfer of a way of life.
Idolatry is when you worship what you should use, and use what you should worship.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them.
The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet’s; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic’s.
If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.
Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.
Freethinkers are occasionally thoughtful, though never free.
The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.
When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live.
Though I believe in liberalism, I find it difficult to believe in liberals.
It seems a pity that psychology has destroyed all our knowledge of human nature.
The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.
I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.
I would never commit the positively anti-social action of robbing a bank, or worse still, working in one.