The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps.

It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great.

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself.

Man lives by imagination.

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.

Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?

The byproduct is sometimes more valuable than the product.

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities. A life is beautiful and ideal or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship.

What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.

The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.

However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.

The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

If men and women are to understand each other, to enter into each other's nature with mutual sympathy, and to become capable of genuine comradeship, the foundation must be laid in youth.

There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.

Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.

Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.

The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps.

What we call "morals" is simply blind obedience to words of command.

To be a leader of men one must turn one's back on men.

A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

'Charm' - which means the power to effect work without employing brute force - is indispensable to women. Charm is a woman's strength just as strength is a man's charm.

A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.

One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take.

The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.

The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.

I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.

The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man's or woman's body, is the pattern of all the process of our life.

In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.

Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.

The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.

Dont make a mountain out of a molehill.

It will take a long time, and certainly the West will remain the dominant civilization well into the next century, but the decline is occurring.

Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages.

Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

The only hope is that our civilization will collapse at a certain point, as always happens in history. Then, out of barbarity, a renaissance.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

No civilization other than that which is Christian, is worth seeking or possessing.

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.