"Persons who feel themselves to be exiles in this world—and what noble mind, from Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?—are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another."

"Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted to paganism."

"Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind."

"The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him."

"Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge."

"In Walt Whitman democracy is carried into psychology and morals. The various sights, moods, and emotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all free and equal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to speak like the others. Those moments formerly reputed great are not excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their companions—plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour."

"To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic."

"Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand."

"No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right. ** p. 49"

"Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained."

"To covet truth is a very distinguished passion."

"The Bible is literature, not dogma."

"Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood."

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

"Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome."

"Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal."

"When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country."

"History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rest on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe."

"Art like life should be free, since both are experimental."

"The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force, however unfavourable to given interests."

"To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation."

"Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor."

"Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit."

"Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion."

"Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them."

"Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them."

"In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas."

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

"What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art."

"Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare, if common, it must become mean."

"Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate."

"It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation."

"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love."

"The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice."

"The highest form of vanity is love of fame."

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim."

"Stubbornness equals character roughly as lust equals love."

"Pleasure can be supported by an illusion, but happiness rests upon truth."

"In the world you have three sorts of friends: your friends who love you, your friends who do not care about you and your friends who hate you."

"There are people who feel the need to be prominent, to rise above their fellow men, at all costs. Their whole concern is to play the charlatan in full view of everyone: on the stage, on the throne or on the gallows, they'll always feel fine as long as they're the centre of attention."

"La pensée console de tout et remédie à tout. Si quelquefois elle vous fait du mal, demandez-lui le remède du mal qu'elle vous a fait, elle vous le donnera."

"There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools."

"Je m'en vais enfin de ce monde, où il faut que le cœur se brise ou se bronze."

"Most anthologists of poetry or quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters, first picking the best and ending by eating everything."

"We must start human society from scratch; as Francis Bacon said, we must recreate human understanding."

"The only thing that stops God sending a second Flood is that the first one was useless."

"Eminence without merit earns deference without esteem."

"Quiconque n'a pas de caractère n'est pas un homme, c'est une chose."

"La plus perdue de toutes les journées est celle où l'on n'a pas ri."