The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
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The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
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The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
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The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
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One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
Friendship
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The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
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A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
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Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
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Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
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The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
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The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
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It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
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Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is.
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The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
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It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
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The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
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Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
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The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
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Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
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Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
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Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
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Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
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