Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws.
The only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.
Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.
Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.
The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.
Every thing to be true must become a religion.
There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America.
I never saw so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-looking Bohemians in my life.
As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.
Life is a great disappointment.
It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of the world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.
Im Krieg machen die Starken die Schwachen zu Sklaven, im Frieden machen die Reichen die Armen zu Sklaven.
That is the mission of art – to make us pause and look at a thing a second time.
And, by the way, one of the most delightful things I find in America is meeting a people without prejudice – everywhere open to the truth.
The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.
While to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all.
In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.
Comfort is the only thing our civilization can give us.
We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them, they leave them alone.
The evil that machinery is doing is not merely in the consequence of its work but in the fact that it makes men themselves machines also.