There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself.

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago… had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.

It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great.

The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.

In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.

There has never been any country at every moment so virtuous and so wise that it has not sometimes needed to be saved from itself.

The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.

The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man’s or woman’s body, is the pattern of all the process of our life.

The absence of flaw in beauty is itself a flaw.

The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.

To be a leader of men one must turn one’s back on men.

Thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

Man lives by imagination.

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.

I always seem to have a vague feeling that he is a Satan among musicians, a fallen angel in the darkness who is perpetually seeking to fight his way back to happiness.

‘Charm’ – which means the power to effect work without employing brute force – is indispensable to women. Charm is a woman’s strength just as strength is a man’s charm.

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.

Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.

The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.

The byproduct is sometimes more valuable than the product.

If men and women are to understand each other, to enter into each other’s nature with mutual sympathy, and to become capable of genuine comradeship, the foundation must be laid in youth.

Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?

However well organized the foundations of life may be, life must always be full of risks.

What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

The romantic embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.

The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.

One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.

Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.

A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray.

The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being’s functions and activities. A life is beautiful and ideal or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship.

What we call “morals” is simply blind obedience to words of command.