“The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.”
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
“There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”
“Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.”
“Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.”
“Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.”
“A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.”
“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”
“A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.”
“So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, the Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable.”
“What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.”
“Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of true science.”
“Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.”
“That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.”
“There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.”
“Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.”
“A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.”
“But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed -- a compass, not a weathercock.”
“It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.”
“Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.”
“Science has ''explained'' nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.”
“Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.”
“I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.”
“The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.”
“Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.”
“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”
“What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes --ah, they have all the necessary leisure.”
“Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds?”
“Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.”
“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.”