59 quotes
I am doing my best to glorify the scamp or vagabond.
The Importance of Living (1937)
The scamp will be the last and most formidable enemy of dictatorships. He will be the champion of human dignity and individual freedom, and will be the last to be conquered. All modern civilization depends entirely upon him.
The Importance of Living (1937)
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
The greatest ideal that man can aspire to is not to be a show-case of virtue, but just to be a genial, likable and reasonable human being.
The Importance of Living (1937)
All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.
The three great American vices seem to be efficiency, punctuality, and the desire for achievement and success. They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous.
The Importance of Living (1937)
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
It is not when he is working in the office but when he is lying idly on the sand that his soul utters, "Life is beautiful."
The Importance of Living (1937)
The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine.
The Importance of Living (1937)
Only those who take leisurely what the people of the world are busy about can be busy about what the people of the world take leisurely.
The Importance of Living (1937)
I distrust all dead and mechanical formulas for expressing anything connected with human affairs and human personalities. Putting human affairs in exact formulas shows in itself a lack of the sense of humor and therefore a lack of wisdom.
The Importance of Living (1937)
The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons and grandsons of whom we need to be ashamed.
The Importance of Living (1937)
The creative imagination of the Hindus has conceived no loftier and holier character than Sita; the literature of the world has not produced a higher ideal of womanly love, womanly truth, and womanly devotion.
The Wisdom Of China And India (1944)
A vague uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals.
The Importance of Living (1937)
It is not when he is working in his office but when he is lying idly on the sand that his soul utters, "Life is beautiful."
Human life can be lived like a poem.
The Importance of Living (1937)
When there are too many policemen, there can be no individual liberty, when there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice, and when there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace.
Between Tears and Laughter (1943)
When there are too many policemen, there can be no liberty. When there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace. When there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice.
My faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined and regimented soldier.
The Importance of Living (1937)
Nothing matters to a man who says nothing matters.