They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life.

Religions are not true or false, but better or worse.

O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies; To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.

In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.

Although a poem be not made by counting of syllables upon the fingers, yet "numbers" is the most poetical synonym we have for verse, and "measure" the most significant equivalent for beauty, for goodness, and perhaps even for truth. Those early and profound philosophers, the followers of Pythagoras, saw the essence of all things in number, and it was by weight, measure, and number, as we read in the Bible, that the Creator first brought Nature out of the void.

There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free,from world to world, from all worlds carried me.

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his judgement, and the range of his thoughts.

Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs.

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

Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age against a new crop of rebels.

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.

To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.

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

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.

Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.

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

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things.

No doubt the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves.

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.

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 living have never shown me how to live.

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

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.

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.

Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.

... I once shook hands with Longfellow at a garden party in 1881; and I often saw Dr. Holmes, who was our neighbor in Beacon Street: but Emerson I never saw.

At midday the daily food of all Spaniards was the puchero or cocido, as the dish is really called which the foreigners call pot-pourri or olla podrida. This contains principally yellow chick-peas, with a little bacon, some potatoes or other vegetables and normally also small pieces of beef or sausage, all boiled in one pot at a very slow fire; the liquid of the same makes the substantial broth that is served first.

All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.

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.

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

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.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of praise.

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

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.

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

The soul, too, has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.

On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices.

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.

Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare, if common, it must become mean.

What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

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.