The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
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.
Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
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.
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.
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
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.
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
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.
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.
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.
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'
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.
There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.