Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.
There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.
'Tis healthy to be sick sometimes.
When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.
Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills we shall never surrender.
Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.
The law will never make a man free it is men who have got to make the law free.
Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.
How does it become a man to behave towards the American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.
If you're going through hell, keep going.
Live the life you've dreamed.
Nature and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
That a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.
Some mischievous people always there. Last several thousand years, always there. In future, also.
Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.
The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.
The important thing is that men should have a purpose in life. It should be something useful, something good.
I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
We don't receive wisdom we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.
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