I am willing to allow that smoking is a moral weakness, but on the other hand, we must beware of the man without weaknesses. He is not to be trusted. He is apt to be always sober and he cannot make a single mistake. His habits are likely to be regular, his existence more mechanical and his head always maintains its supremacy over his heart. Much as I like reasonable persons, I hate completely rational beings.
The most bewildering thing about man is his idea of work and the amount of work he imposes upon himself, or civilization has imposed upon him. All nature loafs, while man alone works for a living.
Sometimes there are more tears than laughter, and sometimes there is more laughter than tears, and sometimes you feel so choked you can neither weep nor laugh. For tears and laughter there will always be so long as there is human life. When our tear wells have run dry and the voice of laughter is silenced, the world will be truly dead.
Business men who are busy the whole day and immediately go to bed after supper, snoring like cows, are not likely to contribute anything to culture.
Only he who handles his ideas lightly is master of his ideas, and only he who is master of his ideas is not enslaved by them.
Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body.
However vague they are, dreams have a way of concealing themselves and leave us no peace until they are translated into reality, like seeds germinating underground, sure to sprout in their search for the sunlight.
There is a great probability that our loss of capacity for enjoying the positive joys of life is largely due to the decreased sensibility of our senses and our lack of full use of them. All human happiness is sensuous happiness.
Neckties strangle clear thinking.
The world I believe is far too serious, and being far too serious ... it has need of a wise and merry philosophy.
A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o'clock has the whole afternoon ruined for him already.
Even in despair, man must laugh.
An educated man is one who has the loves and hatreds together.
A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.
Everything that we think God has in his mind necessarily proceeds from our own mind; it is what we imagine to be in God's mind, and it is really difficult for human intelligence to guess at a divine intelligence. What we usually end up with by this sort of reasoning is to make God the color-sergeant of our army and to make Him as chauvinistic as ourselves.
Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.
Few men who have liberated themselves from the fear of God and the fear of death are yet able to liberate themselves from the fear of man.
Of all the unhappy people in the world, the unhappiest are those who have not found something they want to do.
What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?
Of all the rights of women, the greatest is to be a mother
Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.
The only test of a soul's salvation is its inward happiness.
Since the invention of the flush toilet and the vacuum carpet cleaner, the modern man seems to judge a man's moral standards by his cleanliness, and thinks a dog the more highly civilized for having a weekly bath and a winter wrapper round his belly.
A vague uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals.
A tendency to fly too straight at a goal, instead of circling around it, often carries one too far.
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