On Love:
Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection must rest on circumstantial evidence.
Love is only half the illusion the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
On Life:
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
Work and love — these are the basics waking life is a dream controlled.
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.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions
Sanity is a madness put to good uses waking life is a dream controlled.
Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
On Death:
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
Love makes us poets, and the approach of death should makes us philosophers
On Happiness:
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
On Knowledge:
Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
On Religion:
Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.