Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

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.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions...

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely...

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings