The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life – or at least the way life should be.

A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

There is no such thing as part freedom.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

We are never further from what we wish than when we believe that we have what we wished for.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

Archimedes was my ideal. I admired the works of artists, but to my mind, they were only shadows and semblances. The inventor, I thought, gives to the world creations which are palpable, which live and work.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.

To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

My philosophy is that if I have any money I invest it in new ventures and not have it sitting around.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.