Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.

To covet truth is a very distinguished passion.

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

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

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

When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country.

The living have never shown me how to live.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This famous statement has produced many paraphrases and variants: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes. Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it. Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them. Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.

The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.

... 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.

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

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.

Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

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

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.

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.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

Words ... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in 'foreign commerce' on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves-this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together.

There is no original truth, only original error.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

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.