De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

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 desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'

Dream in a pragmatic way.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

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.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.

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

God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

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.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

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

There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

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

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

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.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

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

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

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 inclemency of life?

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

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

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.

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

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

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 of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.