The most evident quality of human life is its loneliness.

Revenge is often like biting a dog because the dog bit you.

Civilization is the world with its leg asleep.

We should thank God that He did not give us the power of hearing through walls; otherwise there would be no such thing as friendship.

If you are without an enemy in the world, you may be a lamb or an ass, but you are not a man.

Life is a charity ball given by the leaders of society. A few dance, get their charity's worth to the last penny; and the poor stand outside the gate and watch with hungry eyes the glint of jewels in the warm air. Then comes the lackey Death, and he says: "Madam and my Master, your carriage waits." So they go away into the dark in the carriage of the black plumes, and the dancing continues.

You can buy life only with life.

Man usually thinks liberty is the power of doing what he likes to do. That is license.

The habits of a young man are, like his coat, removable; the habits of an old man are like the drapery of a statue.

History is a vast dust-heap of falsehood with a few pennies of truth scattered through it.

Humor wades across a brook, wit jumps over it.

A book is like a money-changer: it pays you back in another form what you brint to it.

Wisdom is also a deeper consciousness of ignorance.

A poem sings with a bad accent in any language not its own.

Love is a boomering that returns to the thrower's hand.

If all fools wore white hoods, any crowd would look like a field of blooming buckwheat.

Art is one of man's few serious activities.

We go to a book as Narcissus went to the fountain, see ourselves therein, and are enamored.

They often say woman cannot keep a secret, but every woman in the world, like every man, has a hundred secrets in her own soul which she hides from even herself. The more respectable she is, the more certain it is the secrets exist.

The monk that invented gunpowder did as much to stop war as did all the sermons of his brethren.

A man that is deeply in love with himself will probably succeed in his suit owing to a lack of rivals.

It does not require a flood of grief to drown a child's heart.

Human passion is a heavy working charge of electricity, which runs safely and profitably through the cable reason; but, if the cable is broken, the current becomes dangerous.

An artist carrying a thought from his mind into expression is like a child bearing a bucket brimming with water from the well to the house--part of the content is spilled.

Liberty has as many chains as an iron-monger's shop, and as rusty.

A translation of a poem is like a plastercast of a statue.

An essential quality of beauty is aloofness.

Justice and the facade of a temple are seen best from the outside.

Our lives are waves that come up out of the ocean of eternity, break upon the beach of earth, and lapse back to the ocean of eternity. Some are sunlit, some run in storm and rain; one is a quiet ripple, another is a thunderous breaker; and once in many centuries comes a great tidal wave that sweeps over a continent; but all go back to the sea and lie equally level there.

There is likely to be beauty wherever proportion exists.

Truth as philosophy is a gas; as art, it is visible steam.

A man's life is like a well, not like a snake--it should be measured by its depth, not by its length.

The perfect critic is one ... that sees with the eyes of posterity.

Religion is a process of turning your skull into a tabernacle, not of going up to Jerusalem once a year.

Our notions of God are tinged by our own characters and ignorance.

Worry is half impatience and half ignorance.

Give a loaded revolver to an infant and a vote to an ignorant man.

Some men live altogether outside their own souls; some live altogether within their own souls; some pass out and in: these last are the best men.

Our sins are like a carousel where the same decorated dogs, pigs, and goats, ridden by the foolish, come around again and again until the machine wears out.

That art is best which suggests most.

Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.

An army in peace is like an overcoat in July--not useful, but not to be thrown away.

The difference between a human being ten years of age and one fifty years of age lies altogether in the matter of toys.

Wealth is a tide which flows into one place by ebbing from another.

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