The feelings that Beethoven put into his music were the feelings of a god. There was something olympian in his snarls and rages, and there was a touch of hellfire in his mirth.
Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
Taxation, for example, is eternally lively; it concerns nine-tenths of us more directly than either smallpox or golf, and has just as much drama in it; moreover, it has been mellowed and made gay by as many gaudy, preposterous theories.
Evil is that which one believes of others.
Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness.
A poet over 30 is pathetic.
The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails.
The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked...
The great achievement of liberal Protestantism was to make God boring.
After all is said and done, a hell lot of a lot more is said than done.
I can’t imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
What is the professor’s function? To pass on to numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and largely untrue.
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
If all the lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones were sold to a mah jong factory, we’d all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.
Some boys go to college and eventually succeed in getting out. Others go to college and never succeed in getting out. The latter are called professors.
Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals.
We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable.
To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.
One does not arise from such a book as Sister Carrie with a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched.