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

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

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

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

Comfort and prosperity have never enriched the world as much as adversity has.

How great is the mystery of the first cells which were one day animated by the breath of our souls! How impossible to decipher the welding of successive influences in which we are forever incorporated! In each one of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

To be is to do.

My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a ‚race‘ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

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.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone.

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

There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Farewell, fair cruelty.

Upon the creatures we have made, we are, ourselves, at last, dependent.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.

Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.

A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. There will be sleeping enough in the grave.

But men are men; the best sometimes forget.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

It’s human nature to blame someone else for your shortcomings or upsets.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

I am getting to the point where the only love worth being in is the love worth singing about.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.

The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.

Nature is not human hearted.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man’s being unable to sit still in a room.

Remembrance and reflection how allied. What thin partitions divides sense from thought.

Contemplation of life after retirement and life after death can help you deal with contemporary challenges.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.

Sometimes we look back and 10 years from now we think, ‚Boy, those were great old days.‘ Well, you know, we’re living in the good old days.

Sweet is the memory of past troubles.

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

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

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

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

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

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

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.

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.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

Make no mistake about why these babies are here – they are here to replace us.

All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

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

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.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them. We don’t want victories anymore.