love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

The worship of power is an old religion.

To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

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

The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.

With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.

The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

The earth has its music for those who will listen.

Consciousness is a born hermit.

The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost.

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

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

Depression is rage spread thin.

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.

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 humor.

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.

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

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions, their reasons are always different.

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

To knock a thing down especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle is a deep delight to the blood.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Before you contradict an old man my fair friend you should endeavour to understand him.

Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo The Last Puritan and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.

Art is a delayed echo.

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

In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.

There is nothing to which men while they have food and drink cannot reconcile themselves.

Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die which is man's charter of nobility.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

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

The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.

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

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

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

To cement a new friendship especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person and cut across the accidents of place and time.

It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on without enquiry and almost at first sight the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends the part known gives us evidence enough that the unknown part cannot be much amiss.

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

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium of custom of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason.

There is nothing sacred about convention there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.

Habit is stronger than reason.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

I believe in the possibility of happiness if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions including optimism.

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

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

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

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.

Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.

Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway.

It is wisdom to believe the heart.

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

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

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

Habit is stronger than reason.

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

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

Progress far from consisting in change depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are content to repeat it.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

Each religion by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.

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.

Work and love - these are the basics waking life is a dream controlled.

If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

Science is nothing but developed perception interpreted intent common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.

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

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

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past according to his interest in the present.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Before he sets out the traveller must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. If he drifted aimlessly from country to country he would not travel but only wander ramble as a tramp. The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere so his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.

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

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one no less wise to balance it.