Which Quotes

Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

God's first creature, which was light.

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.

Liberty consists in the power of doing that which is permitted by the law.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I'm taking with me when I go.

No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.

Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.

Wit - the salt with which the American humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.

I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?

The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.

A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.

Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.

The weeds keep multiplying in our garden, which is our mind ruled by fear. Rip them out and call them by name.