I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.
The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.
This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.
Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
One does not leave a convivial party before closing time.
Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.
The short words are best, and the old words are the best of all.
In the state of nature profit is the measure of right.
We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.
To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.
Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.
Even when a person has all of life's comforts - good food, good shelter, a companion - he or she can still become unhappy when encountering a tragic situation.
There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.
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