My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

Sanity is madness put to good use.

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.

A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

Depression is rage spread thin.

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

Habit is stronger than reason.

The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.

Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.

To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.