That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach.
Happiness is something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.
A fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour for their curiosity their intolerance of shams the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
And the two essential and indispensable things are first of all intelligence in the right most sense of that word and goodwill or the old fashion word charity/love, I mean these two things have to go...
In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunic...
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely...
„Hitler´s dictatorship, he said, „differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. It was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical developement, a dictto...
The course of every intellectual if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough ends in the obvious from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves to multiply the ways in which they exist to make their life full significant and interesting.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.