Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

The only completely consistent people are the dead.

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.

Which is better: to have Fun with Fungi or to have Idiocy with Ideology, to have Wars because of Words, to have Tomorrow's Misdeeds out of Yesterday's Miscreeds?

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

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.

Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

To us, the moment 8:17am means something - something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance - did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.

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?

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is Music.

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the "higher life".

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.