A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavour to understand him.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are content to repeat it.
An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.
Work and love - these are the basics; waking controlled.
There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.
England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humours.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved and it makes free those who have loved it.
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosses passions, including optimism.
A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.
Popular poets are the parish priests of the muse, retailing her ancient divination's to a long since converted public.
Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.
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.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests.
One's friends are part of the human race with which one can be human.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
It is wisdom to believe the heart.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots.
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
In a moving world re adaptation is the price of longevity.
Well - bred instinct meets reason halfway.
The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
For an idea even to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old - fashioned.
Happiness is the only sanction in life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Habit is stronger than reason.
Every real object must cease to be what it seemed and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.
If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.
Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter nobility.
There is no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval.
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
If all the arts aspire to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out, and minutely articulated.
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