Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past according to his interest in the present.
Science is nothing but developed perception interpreted intent common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
I believe in the possibility of happiness if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions including optimism.
Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die which is man's charter of nobility.
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions, their reasons are always different.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.