Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.

why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.