 Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain. |
| A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor. |
| Every person who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make life full, significant, and interesting. |
| Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself. |
| The proper study of mankind is books. |
| The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm. Topics: Age |
| Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength. |
| The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name. |
| From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn. |
| There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception. |
| Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you. |
| A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it. |
| Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors. |
| Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying. |
| Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking. |
| To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs. |
| Several excuses are always less convincing than one. |
| Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness. |
| That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep. |
| You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear. |
