“Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.”
“Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experience.”
“Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.”
“Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.”
“By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.”
“To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.”
“Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.”
“Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.”
“There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.”
“To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.”
“The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.”
“A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.”
“The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.”
“The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.”
“It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.”
“Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.”
“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.”
“A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.”
“The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.”
“I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.”
“The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.”
“Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.”
“The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.”
“In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality. The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.”
“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.”
“The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.”
“The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.”