“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim”.
“The family is one of nature’s masterpieces”.
“Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on”.
“When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different”.
“Wealth is dismal and poverty cruel unless both are festive. There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval”. [There is a cure for birth and death: to use interval to understand birth and death].
“The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms”.
“Fun is a good thing, but only when it spoils nothing better”.
“Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled”.
“The idea that horrors are required to give zest to life and interest to art is the idea of savages, men of no experience worth mentioning, and of merely servile, limited sensibilities. Don’t tolerate it”.
“I suppose people aren’t ashamed of doing or feeling anything, no matter what, if only they can do it together. And sometimes two people are enough”.
“Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character”.
“If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved”.
“A man’s hatred of his own condition no more helps to improve it than hatred of other people tends to improve them”.
“Happiness is impossible and even inconceivable to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure, and fear”.
“Life is a succession of second bests”.
“The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums”.
“The age is not intellectual, but the human race is capable of becoming so, and ought not to be ashamed of the fact”.
“That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions”.
“Intoxication is a sad business, at least for a philosopher; for you must either drown yourself altogether, or else when sober again you will feel somewhat fooled by yesterday’s joys and somewhat lost in to-day’s vacancy”.
“Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside”.
“I have no axe to grind; only my thoughts to burnish”.
“If you bravely make the best of a crazy world, eternity is full of champions that will defend you”.
“A need is not a good. It denotes a condition to be fulfilled before some natural virtue can be exercised and some true good thereby attained. To feel needs is to feel separated from the good by some unfulfilled prerequisite to possessing it”.
“Thinking is a way of living, and the most vital way”.
“An ignorant mind believes itself omniscient and omnipotent; those impulses in itself which really represent the inertia and unspent momentum of its last dream it regards as the creative forces of nature".
“Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer”.
“On the whole the world has seemed to me to move in the direction of light and reason, not that reason can ever govern human affairs, but that illusions and besetting passions may recede from the minds of men and allow reason to shine there”.
“The love of life is not something rational, or founded on experience of life. It is something antecedent and spontaneous”.
“To be happy, even to conceive happiness, you must be reasonable or (if Nietzsche prefers the word) you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passions and learned your place in the world and what things in it can really serve you. To be happy you must be wise”.
“There is no dilemma in the choice between animal faith and reason, because reason is only a form of animal faith, and utterly unintelligible dialectically, although full of a pleasant alacrity and confidence, like the chirping of birds”.
“Dogmatism in the thinker is only the speculative side of greed and courage in the brute”.
“Logic is a refined form of grammar”.
“Of course, I like agreement, it warms the heart, but I don’t expect it; and I like disagreement too, when it is intelligent and carries a thought further, rather than contradicts it a priori, from a different point of departure. These different points of departure make discussion futile and unpleasant”.
“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humour”.
“When omniscience was denied us, we were endowed with versatility. The picturesqueness of human thought may console us for its imperfection”.
“Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality; how many people read and write, or how many people there are, or what is the annual value of their trade; whereas true progress would rather lie in reading and writing fewer and better things, and being fewer and better men, and enjoying life more”.
“It is war that wastes a nation’s wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation”.
“To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love”.
“When a genteel tradition forbids people to confess that they are unhappy, serious poetry and profound religion are closed to them”.
“There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he”.
“Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean”.
“It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers. . . . It is no accident for the soul to be embodied; her very essence is to express and bring to fruition the body’s functions and resources. Its instincts make her ideals and its relations her world. A native country is a sort of second body, another enveloping organism to give the will definition. A specific inheritance strengthens the soul”.
“The organisation of liberty is a grand thing, a little like a steam-roller. I am willing to be rolled, if enough to live on is squeezed into me in the process. I am content that it should be only in philosophy that, as the Upanishads put it, I wander alone like the rhinoceros”.
“History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten”.
“Only when vitality is low do people find material things oppressive and ideal things unsubstantial”.
“The function of history . . . is not passively to reproduce its subject-matter”.
“America is all one prairie, swept by a universal tornado. Although it has always thought itself in an eminent sense the land of freedom, even when it was covered with slaves, there is no country in which people live under more overpowering compulsions”.
“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”.
“So I believe, compulsorily and satirically, in the existence of this absurd world; but as to the existence of a better world, or of hidden reason in this one, I am incredulous, or rather, I am critically sceptical; because it is not difficult to see the familiar motives that lead men to invent such myths”.
“A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel”.
“I wish to mourn perpetually the absence of what I love or might love. Isn’t that what religious people call the love of God?”.
“That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject”.
“Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes”.
“Religion too often debauches the morality it comes to sanction, and impedes the science it ought to fulfil”.
“It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig”.
“Spirituality, then, lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely as a vehicle for joy”.
“Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace”
“Two mistakes seem to me to inhere in moralism: one, that God cannot be good or worthy of worship unless he obeys the precepts of human morality; the other, that if God is not good after our fashion, our own morality is undermined”.
“What establishes superstitions is haste to understand, rash confidence in the moral intelligibility of things”.
“Belief in a thousand hells and heavens will not lift the apathetic out of apathy or hold back the passionate from passion”.
“God is a name the world gives to the devil when he is victorious”.
“The religion of the optimists is one long lazy lie”.
“But since, as a matter of fact, birth and death, actually occur, and our brief career is surrounded by vacancy, it is far better to live in the light of the tragic fact, rather than to forget or deny it, and build everything on a fundamental lie”.
“Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities”.
“What would you ask of philosophy? To feed you on sweets and lull you in your errors in hope that death may overtake you before you understand anything? Ah, wisdom is sharper than death and only the brave can love her”.
“Something in me has always rebelled against the priggish habit of drawing up an honours-list of poets and philosophers, and proclaiming who is the winner. They were not running a race, and though they may have thought so they were not really practicing the same art. A relative rank may be assigned to artists of a single school by a public that has no other standards; but who shall judge that school or that public?”.
“Love makes us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers”.
“Philosophy seems to me to be its own reward, and its justification lies in the delight and dignity of the art itself”.
“In the end every philosopher has to walk alone.”
“I am not indifferent, and I am not well informed: whereas a philosopher should be well informed and dispassionate”.
“I have always liked understanding views with which I did not agree—how else could one like the study of philosophy?”.
“It is very hard for philosophers to put on one another’s shoes”.
“It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy”.
“The business of a philosopher is . . . to be a good shepherd of his thoughts”.
“And what is philosophy, as the governance and appreciation of life, except religion liberated from groundless fear or anxiety, that is to say from superstition, and also from rage at honest illusions?”.
“There are three traps that strangle philosophy: the Church, the marriage-bed, and the professor’s chair”.
“A philosophy is not genuine unless it inspires and expresses the life of those who cherish it”.
“Belief in indeterminism is a sign of indetermination. No commanding or steady intellect flirts with so miserable a possibility, which in so far as it actually prevailed would make virtue impotent and experience, in its pregnant sense, impossible”.
“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. And the reason is not too far to seek. When there is philosophical orthodoxy, and speculation is expected to be a reasoned defence of some funded inspiration, it becomes itself corporate and traditional, and requires centres of teaching, endowment, and propaganda”.
“In those universities where philosophical controversy is rife, [philosophy’s] traditional and scholastic character is no less obvious; it lives less on meditation than on debate, and turns on proofs, objects, paradoxes, or expedients for seeiming to re-establish everything that had come to seem clearly false, by some ingenious change of front or some twist of dialectic”.
“Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine”.
“Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention”.
“In love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected; it is recognised and obeyed”.
“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness”.
“They say dying animals go into hiding; and I could understand that instinct. There are phases of distress when help is neither possible nor desired. It is simpler, easier, more honest to be seasick alone, and to die alone. The trouble then seems something fated, not to be questioned, like life itself; and nature is built to face it and to see it out”.
“The pure spirit in us may safely cultivate universal sympathies; for it can have no grudge against anything and will be tender also to our accidental natural selves and our home world; but the man must remain loyal to himself and his traditions, or he will be morally a eunuch and a secret hater of all mankind”.
“Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it”.
“Poetry is not to be spread on things like butter, but must shine on them like dew”.
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