A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
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.
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
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 knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
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.
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
