The one self- knowledge worth having is to know one’s own mind.
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.
His mind is so open – so open that ideas simply pass through it.
The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.
The cost of a thing is what I call life which has to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Religion is rather the attempt to express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect of our being.
It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himself.
The man whose nature is such that by one path alone his chief desire will reach consummation will try to find it on that path, whatever it may be, and whatever the world thinks of it; and if he does not, he is contemptible.
I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.
The propriety of some persons seems to consist in having improper thoughts about their neighbors.
We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.
The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.
The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.
An aphorism is true where it has fixed the impression of a genuine experience.
Eclecticism. Every truth is so true that any truth must be false.
My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside… the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.
Up to a certain point every man is what he thinks he is.
There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.
The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.
But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.
Few people would not be the worse for complete sincerity.
The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.
Reason teaches us that what is good is good for something, and that what is good for nothing is not good at all.
One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.
