It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
Happiness is the only sanction in life where happiness fails existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another people are friends in spots.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
My atheism like that of Spinoza is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
Happiness is the only sanction of life where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been...