Life too near paralyses art.
Artists must be sacrificed to their art.
Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.
Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.
He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself.
The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated; the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.
The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.
The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.
If all you can do is crawl, start crawling.
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lift human life above the level of farce and give it some of the grace of tragedy.
There are many victories worse than a defeat.
Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.
Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized.
It is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.
Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.
When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.
Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.
Perhaps man is the only being that can properly be called idle.
Humility and knowledge in poor clothes excel pride and ignorance in costly attire.
Fatigue makes cowards of us all.
I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
