A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.
In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.
Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.
There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor's chair.
Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.
Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.
The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.
Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a figleaf.
Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
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.
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
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.
The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
Art is a delayed echo.
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