Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible...

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...

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more,...

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.