Life and Existence

Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures.

There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of mind suffers, as compared with the man of action. While he is talcing an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he lets his chance slip through his fingers.

We find it hard to get and to keep any private property in thought. Other people are all the time saying the same things we are hoarding to say when we get ready.

Thinking is hard work. One can’t bear burdens and ideas at the same time.

Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all other qualities. It is the ne plus ultra of the intelligence.

Nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment.

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

One has to dismount from an idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.

Earth reserves no blessing / For the unblessed of Heaven!

If your life at night is good, you think you have / Everything; but, if in that quarter things go wrong, / You will consider your best and truest interests /

Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society.

We don’t know each other’s secrets quite so well as we flatter ourselves we do. We don’t always know our own secrets as well as we might.

It is well that the stately synagogue should lift its walls by the side of the aspiring cathedral, a perpetual reminder that there are many mansions in Father’s earthly house as well as in the heavenly ones.

The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.

The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

A thousand things advance; nine hundred and ninety-nine retreat: that is progress.

In a crowd, on a journey at a banquet even, a line of thought can itself provide its own seclusion.

I had rather ride on an ass that carries me than a horse that throws me.

Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still .entangled with the desire for ownership.