Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
Experience is not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
Dream in a pragmatic way.
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.