1. "Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better."
2. “A fanatic is someone who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.”
3. “Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”
4. “A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.”
5. “An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”
6. “A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.”
7. “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.”
8. "Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
9. “Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.”
10. "By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all."
11. “Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.”
12. “Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?”
13. “England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humours.”
14. “Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.”
15. “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”
16. “Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.”
17. “Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.”
18. “Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”
19. "History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten."
20. "History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there."
21. “I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.”
22. "If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved."
23. "In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality....The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral."
24. “Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.”
25. “It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.”
26. “It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.”
27. "Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace."
28. "Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness."
29. "Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome."
30. "Love is only half the illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived."
31. “Love makes us poets and the approach of death makes us philosophers.”
32. “Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.”
33. “Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.”
34. “Men have fiendishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.”
35. "Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited."
36. “Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.”
37. “O MARTYRED Spirit of this helpless Whole,
Who dost by pain for tyranny atone,
And in the star, the atom, and the stone,
Purgest the primal guilt, and in the soul;
Rich but in grief, thou dost thy wealth unroll,
And givest of thy substance to thine own,
Mingling the love, the laughter, and the groan
In the large hollow of the heaven’s bowl.
Fill full my cup; the dregs and honeyed brim
I take from thy just hand, more worthy love
For sweetening not the draught for me or him.
What in myself I am, that let me prove;
Relent not for my feeble prayer, nor dim
The burning of thine altar for my hymn.”
38. “Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.”
39. “O World, thou choosest not the better part!
It's not wisdom to be only wise -
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul's invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.”
40. “Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.”
41. “Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.”
42. “Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.”
43. “Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.”
44. "Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature achieves."
45. “Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.”
46. “Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.”
47. “Sensations are rapid dreams.”
48. “Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.”
49. “Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.”
50. “That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”
51. “The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.”
52. ”The Bible is literature, not dogma.”
53. "The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation."
54. "The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal."
55. “The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.”
56. “The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.”
57. "The mystic can live happily in the droning consciousness of his own and those of the universe."
58. “There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.”
59. ”There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”
60. "The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine."
61. “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. But as it nevertheless intends all the time to be something dignified, at the next moment it corrects and checks and tries to cover up the absurd thing it was; so that a conventional world, a world of masks, is superimposed on the reality, and passes in every sphere of human interest for the reality itself. Humor is the perception of this illusion, whilst the convention continues to be maintained, as if we had not observed its absurdity.”
62. “The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.”
63. ”To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.”
64. "To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman."
65. "To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be. The poets and philosophers who express this aesthetic experience and stimulate the same function in us by their example, do a greater service to mankind and deserve higher honor than the discoveries of historical truths."
66. “To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.”
67. "Truly religious minds, while eager perhaps to extirpate every religion but their own, often rise above national jealousies; for spirituality is universal, whatever churches may be."
68. “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.”
69. “When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.”
70. “Wisdom comes by disillusionment.”
