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