Great Throughts Treasury

"Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions."

"Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all."

"Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous."

"Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood."

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

"Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts."

"Nature is innocent, and so are all her impulses and moods when taken in isolation; it is only on meeting that they blush."

"My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable."

"Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through, that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains."

"Nature is material, but not materialistic; it issues in life, and breeds all sorts of warm passions and idle beauties."

"Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan, and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age, I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure, more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure."

"Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others."

"Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid."

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

"Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body."

"Nothing is so irrevocable as mind."

"Nothing is so poor and melancholy as an art that is interested in itself and not in its subject."

"Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility."

"Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it."

"O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, and on the inward vision close the eyes, but it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, save one that faith deciphered in the skies; to trust the soul’s invincible surmise was all his science and his only art."

"Oaths are the fossils of piety."

"Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal."

"Of course, I like agreement, it warms the heart, but I don't expect it; and I like disagreement too, when it is intelligent and carries a thought further, rather than contradicts it a priori, from a different point of departure. These different points of departure make discussion futile and unpleasant."

"Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp."

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

"One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye."

"One real world is enough"

"Only when vitality is low do people find material things oppressive and ideal things unsubstantial."

"On the whole the world has seemed to me to move in the direction of light and reason, not that reason can ever govern human affairs, but that illusions and besetting passions may recede from the minds of men and allow reason to shine there."

"One of the fatalities of my life has always been that the people with whom I agree frighten me, and I frighten those with whom I naturally sympathize."

"Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine."

"Only the dead have seen the end of war."

"Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity."

"Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality."

"Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies"

"People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another."

"Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up."

"Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies."

"Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities."

"Perception is definable as a sensation turned into knowledge of its ground, that is, of its present occasion."

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

"Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of praise."

"Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public."

"Poetry is not to be spread on things like butter, but must shine on them like dew."

"Philosophy seems to me to be its own reward, and its justification lies in the delight and dignity of the art itself."

"Prejudice is a great time saver. It enables you to form opinions without bothering to get the facts."

"Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained."

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

"Religion too often debauches the morality it comes to sanction, and impedes the science it ought to fulfill."

"Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience."