Everything Quotes

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

Depression is rage spread thin.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.