Liberalism... has a left of center meaning in the United States. It has a slightly right of center meaning in much of continental Europe.

An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person's main task in life-becoming a better person.

Think not so much of what thou hast not as of what thou hast: but of the things which thou hast, select the best, and then reflect how eagerly they would have been sought, if thou hadst them not. At the same time, however, take care that thou dost not, through being so pleased with them, accustom thyself to overvalue them, so as to be disturbed if ever thou shouldst not have them.

Evidence is the only good reason to believe anything.

Virtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.

It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about these responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason.

We cannot observe external things without some degree of Thought; nor can we reflect upon our Thoughts, without being influenced in the course of our reflection by the Things which we have observed.

My reason will still not understand why I pray, but I shall still pray, and my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.

I am a perfect stranger to France, which I have never seen, and I expect nothing from her king, whom I shall never know.

The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned, if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne's question "What if this present were the world's last night?" is equally relevant.

I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.

No rules, however wise, are a substitute for affection and tact.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science. 

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go. The difference is that you can compel your car to go to a garage, but you cannot compel Hitler to go to a psychiatrist.

They sang the praises of nature, of the sea, of the woods. They liked making songs about one another, and praised each other like children; they were the simplest songs, but they sprang from their hearts and went to one's heart. And not only in their songs but in all their lives they seemed to do nothing but admire one another. It was like being in love with each other, but an all-embracing, universal feeling.

I've got a one-dimensional mind.

Do not wonder, if the common people speak more truly than those of high rank; for they speak with more safety.

It is obvious that "obscenity" is not a term capable of exact legal definition; in the practice of the Courts, it means "anything that shocks the magistrate."

Why count the days, when even one days is enough for a man to know all happiness?

At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.

Use, do not abuse; as the wise man commands. I flee Epictetus and Petronius alike. Neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

Skills are called hidden treasure as they save like a mother in a foreign country.

Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them.

Gentile himself call his doctrine 'absolute formalism': there is no; 'matter' apart from the pure 'form' of acting. 'The only matter there is in the spiritual act is the form itself, as activity.'

There is nothing outside the text," which Derrida opponents have characterized to mean that nothing exists but language.

Whoso walketh in solitude, And inhabiteth the wood, Choosing light, wave, rock, and bird, Before the money-loving herd, Into that forester shall pass From these companions power and grace.

There is less trouble and trauma involved in writing a new piece than in trying to salvage an unsatisfactory old one.

About fame... Just as the sand-dunes, heaped one upon another, hide each the first, so in life the former deeds are quickly hidden by those that follow after.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Ambition is the death of thought.

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

Doth the reality of sensible things consist in being perceived? or, is it something distinct from their being perceived, and that bears no relation to the mind?

There's far too much generalization now about rural America. Conservatives and corporations have had their eye on rural America all along. And they've been turning it into money as fast as they can, which is to say destroying the land and the people...

To the wild deep-hearted man all was yet new, not veiled under names or formulas; it stood naked, flashing in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature was to this man, what to the Thinker and Prophet it forever is, preternatural. This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;-that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain.

The Outsider is always unhappy, but he is an agent that ensures the happiness for millions of 'Insiders'.

There's a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness.

Do not block the way of inquiry.

There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.