Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

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

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

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

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

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

Experience teaches only the teachable.

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.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

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.

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

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

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

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

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

One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

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

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