A cocktail party is a place where you talk with a person you do not know about a subject you have no interest in.
No child is born with a really cold heart, and it is only in proportion as we lose that youthful heart that we lose the inner warmth in ourselves.
It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams.
Not until we see the richness of the Hindu mind and its essential spirituality can we understand India.
To me personally the only function of philosophy is to teach us to take life more lightly and gayly than the average businessman does, for no businessman who does not retire at fifty, if he can, is in my eyes a philosopher.
Art is both creation and recreation.
Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.
To glorify the past and paint the future is easy, to survey the present and emerge with some light and understanding is difficult.
What threatens civilization today is not war, but the changing conception of life values entailed by certain political doctrines. Only by recapturing the dream of human freedom and restoring the importance of the common man’s liberties can that undermining threat to modern civilization be averted.
China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.
Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.
He who is afraid to use an “I” in his writing will never make a good writer.
Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.
An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.
Why should man bother himself so much about salvation, unless he has a feeling of being doomed?
Men resort to talking only when they haven’t the power to enforce their convictions upon others.
I feel, like all modern Americans, no consciousness of sin and simply do not believe in it. All I know is that if God loves me only half as much as my mother does, he will not send me to Hell. That is a final fact of my inner consciousness, and for no religion could I deny its truth.
By association with nature’s enormities, a man’s heart may truly grow big also.
This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.
If man be sensible and one fine morning, while he is lying in bed, counts at the tips of his fingers how many things in this life truly will give him enjoyment, invariably he will find food is the first one.