Professional standards, the standards of ambition and selfishness, are always sliding downward toward expense, ostentation, and mediocrity. They tend always to narrow the ground of judgment. But amateur standards, the standards of love, are always straining upward toward the humble and the best. They enlarge the ground of judgment. The context of love is the world.

It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table.

Corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity.

There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

You will die - and it will all be over. You will die and find out everything - or cease asking.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.

Simplicity and nonviolence are the basis of an economy of wellbeing, and such an economy must be localised.

Modem mainstream economic theory bravely assumes that people make their decisions in such a way as to maximize their utility. Accepting this assumption enables economics to predict a great deal of behavior (correctly or incorrectly) without ever making empirical studies of human actors.

We do not require elaborate training merely in order to refrain from embarking upon intricate trains of inference. Such abstinence is only too easy.

Self-respect is the cornerstone of all virtue.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

I am my world.

Lord Jesus Christ, our foolish minds are weak; they are more than willing to be drawn-and there is so much that wants to draw us to itself. There is pleasure with its seductive power, the multiplicity with its bewildering distractions, the moment with its infatuating importance and the conceited laboriousness of busyness and the careless time-wasting of light-mindedness and the gloomy brooding of heavy-mindedness-all this will draw us away from ourselves to itself in order to deceive us. But you, who are truth, only you, our Savior and Redeemer, can truly draw a person to yourself, which you have promised to do-that you will draw all to yourself. Then may God grant that by repenting we may come to ourselves, so that you, according to your Word, can draw us to yourself-from on high, but through lowliness and abasement.

But if you say: "How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?" then I say: "How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?"

Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary.

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.

The Scientist must set in order. Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

Pure mathematics is religion.

The man that does not know himself not to be at the mercy of other men, that does not feel that he is invulnerable to all the vicissitudes of fortune, is incapable of a constant and inflexible virtue.

Man is a universe in little.

Human virtue, if we went down to the roots of it, is not so rare. The materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant as the light of the sun: raw materials,-O woe, and loss, and scandal thrice and threefold, that they so seldom are elaborated, and built into a result! that they lie yet unelaborated, and stagnant in the souls of wide-spread dreary millions, fermenting, festering; and issue at last as energetic vice instead of strong practical virtue!

The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.

For it has been truly observed by a great philosopher, that truth does more easily emerge out of error than confusion.

Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.

I say, it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise; to be guided in the right path by those who know it better than they. This is the first "right of man;" compared with which all other rights are as nothing.

Hypocrisy is a universal phenomenon. It ends with death, but not before.

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.

Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

A bad feeling is a commotion of the mind repugnant to reason, and against nature.

All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it. But all determinations of the understanding are not right; because they have a reference to something beyond themselves, to wit, real matter of fact; and are not always conformable to that standard.

Only to the rational animal is it given to follow voluntarily what happens; but simply to follow is a necessity imposed on all.

It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

Lost time was like a run in a stocking. It always got worse.

Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? - that void is consciousness itself.

All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.

Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

All who delight in the pleasures of the belly, exceeding all measure in eating and drinking and love, find that the pleasures are brief and last but a short while-only so long as they are eating and drinking-but the pains that come after are many and endure. The longing for the same things keeps ever returning, and whenever the objects of one's desire are realized forthwith the pleasure vanishes, and one has no further use for them. The pleasure is brief, and once more the need for the same things returns.

For well-being and health, again, the homestead should be airy in summer, and sunny in winter. A homestead possessing these qualities would be longer than it is deep; and its main front would face the south.

It seemed perfectly possible that, in spite of my certainty of my own genius, I might die of some illness, or perhaps even in a street accident, before I had ever glimpsed the meaning of life. My moods of happiness and self-confidence convinced me that I had a "destiny" to become a famous writer, and to be remembered as one of the most important thinkers of the century.