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.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

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.

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

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rest on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.

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.

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

Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

To covet truth is a very distinguished passion.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

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

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

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

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

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 highest form of vanity is love of fame.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

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.

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

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.

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