Citas

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence, it comes about that at their first appearance, innovators have always been divined as fools and madmen.

To his dog, every man is [Napoléon Bonaparte]; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

A bad book is as much a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamor of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures. Even more unsatisfactory has been the policy of complete toleration and unrestricted availability.

[on children] We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

The means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.