"It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands."
"Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome."
"To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring."
"In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality. The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral."
"The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend."
"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."
"There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books."
"Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence."
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it."
"Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them."
"Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too easily."
"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 or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted."
"Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery busy applying first principles to trifles."
"Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny."
"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."
"Culture is on the horns of this dilemma; if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean."
"To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood."
"Music is esentially useless, as is life."
"Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others."
"An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world."
"Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots."
"The highest form of vanity is love of fame."
"The family is one of nature's masterpieces."
"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
"The Life of Reason (1905), Vol. I, Ch. 12 For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards always be old-fashioned."