England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.

Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal.

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor.

It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy;

Everything ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.

No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right.

All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.

Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted to paganism.

In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war.

To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation.

Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand.

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas.

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.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

Persons who feel themselves to be exiles in this world-and what noble mind, from Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?-are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

I was still "at the church door". Yet in belief, in the clarification of my philosophy, I had taken an important step. I no longer wavered between alternative views of the world, to be put on or taken off like alternative plays at the theatre. I now saw that there was only one possible play, the actual history of nature and of mankind, although there might well be ghosts among the characters and soliloquies among the speeches. Religions, all religions, and idealistic philosophies, all idealistic philosophies, were the soliloquies and the ghosts. They might be eloquent and profound. Like Hamlet's soliloquy they might be excellent reflective criticisms of the play as a whole. Nevertheless they were only parts of it, and their value as criticisms lay entirely in their fidelity to the facts, and to the sentiments which those facts aroused in the critic.

The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force, however unfavourable to given interests.

I like to walk about amidst 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.

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.

American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

The empiricist thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectifications of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water.

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.

Man is an imagining being.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.