“Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach
“Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable
“All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change
“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die
“Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else
“The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.
“Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason - the law which is perfection of reason
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world
“We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.
“How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.
“It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite
“There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming
“Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic, if it is pulled out I shall die
“It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.
“There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish
“It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new
“One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them