''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.''
''The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.''
''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.''
''What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word—the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.''
''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.''
''America is a young country with an old mentality.''
''Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.''
''It is possible to be a master in false philosophy—easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.''
''To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.''
''The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.''
''Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.''
''There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.''
''When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.''
''Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.''
''It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.''
''There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.''
''A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.''
''A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak, by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.''
''Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.''
''Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.''
''Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.''
''Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.''
''The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.''
''Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.''
''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.''
''Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.''
''Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.''
''Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.''
''Oaths are the fossils of piety.''
''A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.''
''Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.''
''The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.''
''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.''
''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.''
''The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.''
''To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.''
''Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.''
''Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.''
''Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.''
''The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.''
''The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.''
''The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.''
''Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.''
''The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.''
''Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.''
''It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.''
''He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the delirium of mankind.''
''Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.''
''The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.''
''You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him.''
''That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.''
''My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.''
''The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.''
''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.''
''Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.''
''The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.''
''It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.''
