Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.
The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.
There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.
Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.
Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.
The only glory most of us have to hope for is the glory of being normal.
men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.
There are inquiries which are a sort of moral burglary.
It is not permissible to lie merely to save one's face. But it is sometimes permissible to lie to save another person's face.
Each man's private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess.
No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is the thin millionaires.
There are only three things worthwhile -- fighting, drinking, and making love.
No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.
Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.
Some of the men and women who will not say in so many words the thing which is not, will deliberately give a false impression. They are not the servants of truth; they are the parasites of truth.
The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog?
[Science] has challenged the super-eminence of religion; it has turned all philosophy out of doors except that which clings to its skirts; it has thrown contempt on all learning that does not depend on it; and it has bribed the skeptics by giving us immense material comforts.
The indiscreet questioner - and by indiscreet questions I mean questions which it is not conceivably a man's duty either to the community or to any individual to answer - is a marauder, and there is every excuse for treating him as such.
For never doubt that those souls who live least by the flesh feel themselves most defiled by its defilement.
... if a person is to be unconventional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable: for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees you nothing but amusement. He does not guarantee you any of the little amenities by which society has assured itself that, if it must go to sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable chair.
The very notion of tabu is one of the rightest notions in the world. Better any old tabu than none, for a man cannot be said to be"on the side of the stars" at all, unless he makes refusals.
The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method.
... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.
The principle of fashion is . . . the principle of the kaleidoscope. A new year can only bring us a new combination of the same elements; and about once in so often we go back and begin again.
I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word [as culture] should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you are apt to lose the thing it stands for.
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