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

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

"All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato."

"Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up."

"Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men."

"If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved."

"Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace."

"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."

"In Greece wise men speak and fools decide."

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

"Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different."

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

"The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape."

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

"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."

"Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality."

"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."

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

"The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings."

"The Bible is literature, not dogma."

"The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age."

"Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness."

"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."

"Oaths are the fossils of piety."

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

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

"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."

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

"Habit is stronger than reason."

"The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool."

"Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots."

"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."

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

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

"The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity."

"Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts."

"To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring."

"Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end."

"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."

"Wisdom comes by disillusionment."

"An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world."

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

"Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them."

"The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy."

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

"To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired."

"Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better."

"To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood."

"When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different."

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