106 quotes
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
The soul, too, has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.
Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)
In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas.
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)
To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)
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.
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.
Introduction to The Ethics of Spinoza (1910)
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
Introduction to The Ethics of Spinoza (1910)
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
Introduction to The Ethics of Spinoza (1910)
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)
Memory itself is an internal rumour.
Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of praise.
Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war.
Persons and Places (1944)
They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life.
Obiter Scripta (1936)
[The empiricist] thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)
All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)