“He who hasn’t tasted bitter things hasn’t earned sweet things.”

There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.

The past is pregnant with the present.

Everything that is possible demands to exist.

I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time; an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions.

I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.

The knowledge which we have acquired ought not to resemble a great shop without order, and without an inventory; we ought to know what we possess, and be able to make it serve us in need.

Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humors, is also such a garden or such a pond.

I am so in favor of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that Nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that Nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its Author.

The words ‘Here you can find perfect peace’ can be written only over the gates of a cemetery.

The world is not a machine. Everything in it is force, life, thought.

It is God who is the ultimate reason things, and the Knowledge of God is no less the beginning of science than his essence and will are the beginning of things.

Indeed in general I hold that there is nothing truer than happiness, and nothing happier and sweeter than truth.

To love is to place happiness in the heart of another.

It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.

The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.

What is is what must be.

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.

I never met a bitter person who was thankful. Or a thankful person who was bitter.

One evening I sat Beauty on my knees – And I found her bitter – And I reviled her.

Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry, Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!

She has every reason to be bitter, and yet her heart beats to the tune of kindness, and her soul dances to the melody of love.

Truth, however bitter, can be accepted, and woven into a design for living.

How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.

There are three ways of learning golf: by study, which is the most wearisome; by imitation, which is the most fallacious; and by experience, which is the most bitter.