106 quotes
The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)
The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger.
Winds of Doctrine (1913)
Piety to mankind must be three-fourths pity.
Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911)
Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human.
The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911)
England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)
Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand.
The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911)
I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
The Idea of Christ in the Gospels (1946)
The living have never shown me how to live.
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)
All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.
Character and Opinion in the United States (1920)
Persons who feel themselves to be exiles in this world—and what noble mind, from Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?—are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.
Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion (1913)
Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.
Persons and Places (1944)
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)
The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force, however unfavourable to given interests.
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)
Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)
What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)