Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.
The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.
How can the moribund old man reason back to himself the romance, the mystery, the imminence of great things with which our old earth tingled for him in the days when he was young and well?
The discovery of the power of our thoughts will prove to be the most important discovery of our time.
The one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them into systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory.
Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.
There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.
Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.
The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.
Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.
To be a real philosopher all that is necessary is to hate some one else’s type of thinking.
Time itself comes in drops.
The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.
The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them.