From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

The proper study of mankind is books.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.

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.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

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

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.