"It is with philosophy as with just intonation on a piano, if you get everything quite straight and on all fours in one department, in perfect tune, it is delightful so long as you keep well in the middle of the key; but as soon as you modulate you find the new key is out of tune and the more remotely you modulate the more out of tune you get."

"As a general rule philosophy is like stirring mud or not letting a sleeping dog lie. It is an attempt to deny, circumvent or otherwise escape from the consequences of the interlacing of the roots of things with one another."

"You can have all ego, or all non-ego, but in theory you cannot have half one and half the other — yet in practice this is exactly what you must have, for everything is both itself and not itself at one and the same time."

"Our choice is apparently most free, and we are least obviously driven to determine our course, in those cases where the future is most obscure, that is, when the balance of advantage appears most doubtful."

"I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy."

"Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well."

"Truth consists not in never lying but in knowing when to lie and when not to do so."

"Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch cold on over-exposure."

"The pursuit of truth is chimerical. That is why it is so hard to say what truth is. There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas."

"Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions."

"The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered."

"Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character, and you reap a destiny."

"Make 'em laugh; make 'em cry; make 'em wait."

"When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece."

"Courage, mon ami, le diable est mort! / Take courage, my friend, the devil is dead!"

"Lower a bucket into a well of self-deception, and what comes up must be immortal truth, mustn't it?"

"...even Christians loved one another at first starting."

"Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows."

"It must be confessed that a sort of halo of personal grandeur surrounds a great actress."

"In players, vanity cripples art at every step."

"First, think in as homely a way as you can; next, shove your pen under the thought, and lift it by polysyllables to the true level of fiction"

"Art is not imitation but illusion."

"What young woman is not, more or less, a mirror?"

"The fortunate man is he who, born poor, or nobody, works gradually up to wealth and consideration, and, having got them, dies before he finds they were not worth so much trouble."

"Well, every one for himself, and Providence for us all--as the elephant said when he danced among the chickens."

"A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage—but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends."

"An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed."

"As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes do; it was a fight about names — not about things; practically the Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman. Then he saw also that it matters little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may make, provided only he follows it out with charitable inconsistency, and without insisting on it to the bitter end. It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies."

"A man can stand being told that he must submit to a severe surgical operation, or that he has some disease which will shortly kill him, or that he will be a cripple or blind for the rest of his life; dreadful as such tidings must be, we do not find that they unnerve the greatest number of mankind; most men, indeed, go coolly enough even to be hanged, but the strongest quail before financial ruin, and the better men they are, the more complete, as a general rule, is their prostration."

"The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way."

"The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places."

"There are two classes of people in this world, those who sin, and those who are sinned against; if a man must belong to either, he had better belong to the first than to the second."

"To me it seems that those who are happy in this world are better and more lovable people than those who are not."

"Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime."

"One great reason why clergymen's households are generally unhappy is because the clergyman is so much at home or close about the house."

"How is it, I wonder, that all religious officials, from God the Father to the parish beadle, should be so arbitrary and exacting."

"Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed."

"This poem [The Ancient Mariner] would not have taken so well if it had been called “The Old Sailor.”"

"To live is like to love — all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it."

"To put one's trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it."

"Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence."

"The dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything."

"A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words."

"People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect."

"The Will-be and the Has-been touch us more nearly than the Is. So we are more tender towards children and old people than to those who are in the prime of life."

"The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too."

"He is greatest who is most often in men's good thoughts."

"Time is the only true purgatory."