Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive.
You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.
Moral education, ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.
We cannot hope to utter anything worth saying, unless we read and inwardly digest the utterances of our betters.
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
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 philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
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.
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
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, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
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 author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
