All Quotes

"And if the immortality of the soul had been unable to find vindication in rational empiricism, neither is it satisfied with pantheism. To say that everything is God, and that when we die, we return to God, or more accurately, continue in Him, avails our longing nothing; for if this indeed be so, then we were in God before we were born, and if we die we return to where we were before being born, then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable. And since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of Christian monotheism, is simply the provider, and above all the guarantor, of our immortality, pantheism is said, and rightly said to be merely atheism disguised; and in my opinion, undisguised."

"Neither is the longing for immortality saved, but rather dissolved and submerged, by agnosticism, or the doctrine of the unknowable. ...The unknowable, if it is something more than the merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of limitation. And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up."

"From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always found that reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts it. And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of life."

"A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely individual, is strictly unintelligible. Logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one self-same content in whatever place, time or relation it may occur to us. And there is nothing that remains for two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God is different each time that I conceive it. Identity, which is death, is the goal of the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice; it seeks to arrest it. In order to analyze a body it is necessary to extenuate or destroy it. In order to understand anything it is necessary to kill it, to lay it out rigid in the mind."

"Sing away sorrow, cast away care."

"Thank you for nothing."

"Let none presume to tell me that the pen is preferable to the sword."

"Now had Aurora displayed her mantle over the blushing skies, and dark night withdrawn her sable veil."

"I tell thee, that is Mambrino's helmet."

"Give me but that, and let the world rub; there I'll stick."

"Sure as a gun."

"Experience, the universal Mother of Sciences."

"Can we ever have too much of a good thing?"

"Take care, Your Worship, those things over there are not giants but windmills."

"The charging of his enemy was but the work of a moment."

"Those two fatal words, Mine and Thine."

"The eyes those silent tongues of Love."

"There's not the least thing can be said or done, but people will talk and find fault."

"Without a wink of sleep."

"The soldier who executes his captain's commands is no less valuable than the captain who gave the order."

"It is a true saying that a man must eat a peck of salt with his friend before he knows him."

"Fortune leaves always some door open to come at a remedy."

"Fair and softly goes far."

"No limits but the sky."

"To give the devil his due."

"Didn't I tell you, Don Quixote, sir, to turn back, for they were not armies you were going to attack, but flocks of sheep?"

"Plain as the nose on a man's face."

"Let me leap out of the frying-pan into the fire; or, out of God's blessing into the warm sun."

"You are taking the wrong sow by the ear."

"Bell, book, and candle."

"You're leaping over the hedge before you come to the stile."

"Let the worst come to the worst."

"You are come off now with a whole skin."

"Fear is sharp-sighted, and can see things underground, and much more in the skies."

"That's the nature of women ... not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not."

"Ill luck, you know, seldom comes alone."

"Why do you lead me a wild-goose chase?"

"I find my familiarity with thee has bred contempt."

"The more thou stir it, the worse it will be."

"After meat comes mustard; or, like money to a starving man at sea, when there are no victuals to be bought with it."

"Of good natural parts and of a liberal education."

"Would puzzle a convocation of casuists to resolve their degrees of consanguinity."

"Let every man mind his own business."

"Murder will out."

"Thou art a cat, and a rat, and a coward."

"Those who'll play with cats must expect to be scratched."

"Raise a hue and cry."

"To do good to villains is to pour water into the sea."

"To withdraw is not to run away, and to stay is no wise action when there is more reason to fear than to hope. 'Tis the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket. And though I am but a clown, or a bumpkin, as you may say, yet I would have you to know I know what is what, and have always taken care of the main chance..."

"I know what's what, and have always taken care of the main chance."