Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age

Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.

It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.

The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.