All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
Dream in a pragmatic way.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Experience is not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you.
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
Science has explained nothing the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
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.
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon hence the constant popularity of dogs.