A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

I admit that mathematical science is a good thing. But excessive devotion to it is a bad thing.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners -- let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'

It is impossible to live without a metaphysic. The choice that is given us us not between some kind of metaphysic and no metaphysic; it is always between a good metaphysic and a bad metaphysic, a metaphysic that corresponds reasonably closely with observed and inferred reality and one that doesn't.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes, and thanks to words, we have sunk to the level of the demons.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

The universe is a continuum; but our knowledge of it is departmentalized. Every learned society is a pigeonhole, every university a columbarium.

Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began.

To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.