Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only pain we obey.
All oppression creates a state of war.
We know but a few men, a great many coats and breeches.
The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.
In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.
True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.
Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
Pleasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends.
No crime is so great as daring to excel.
May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!
I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
We do not covet anything from any nation except their respect.
I am sorry to think that you do not get a man's most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.
It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion.
The chain of wedlock is so heavy that it takes two to carry it - and sometimes three.
Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.
This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.
I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.
It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
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