To insult someone we call him ‚bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, ‚human‘ might be the greater insult.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

I seldom think of politics more than eighteen hours a day.

There can be no doubt that the average man blames much more than he praises. His instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied he says nothing; if he is not, he most illogically kicks up a row.

Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret.

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

Dissents speak to a future age.

You don’t have the same mentality as you did five years ago – even one year. People are always changing, and I believe that everyone deserves the space to change and for people to recognize their change.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

If you’re going to wake up early all the time, and you’re working hard, and you’re working out, sometimes you’re going to get tired. It’s OK. It’s acceptable – somewhat. We’re all human, unfortunately.

When we tell the story of our own conversion, I would have it done with great sorrow, remembering what we used to be, and with great joy and gratitude, remembering how little we deserve these things.

What’s done can’t be undone.

To be is to do.

Last year we said, ‚Things can’t go on like this‘, and they didn’t, they got worse.

The fact is that people are good, Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.

He is lost who is possessed by carnal desire.

Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature.

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

One can not reflect in streaming water. Only those who know internal peace can give it to others.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

It is a most delightful reflection that if I come to the throne of God in prayer, I may feel a thousand defects, but yet there is hope. I usually feel more dissatisfied with my prayers than with anything else I do.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

The things hardest to bear are sweetest to remember.

Too often we… enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

Our life is made by the death of others.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.