Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.

The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.

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

An operation that eventually kills may be technically successful, and the man may die cured; and so a description of religion thatshowed it to be madness might first show how real and warm it was, so that if it perished, at least it would perish understood.

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.