Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

Eclecticism. Every truth is so true that any truth must be false.

The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one’s own mind.

True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.

There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart’s blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.

One said of suicide, “As long as one has brains one should not blow them out.” And another answered, “But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.”