Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity
Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using - you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything, will really do.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption ... For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.
In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation.
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place.
On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
All democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one person or small group have too much power for too long a time
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.
Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure--chemically pure, I mean,... not morally.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves.
Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife.
If you want to write, keep cats.
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