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

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

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.

Few people would not be the worse for complete sincerity.

It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himself.

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.

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

The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.

The man whose nature is such that by one path alone his chief desire will reach consummation will try to find it on that path, whatever it may be, and whatever the world thinks of it; and if he does not, he is contemptible.

Reason teaches us that what is good is good for something, and that what is good for nothing is not good at all.

Another occupation might have been better.

I will begin with the self-styled “Christian” party, who profess to base their morality on the New Testament. But whether it is really more Christian to follow or to ignore the teachings of the Gospels I shall not discuss.

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

Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.

The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.

An aphorism is true where it has fixed the impression of a genuine experience.

Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

We live in a world where sort of nothing is shocking anymore.

At Grinnell College, for the first time in my life, I was in an all-white setting. It was a shocking experience.

In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.

I am always shocked that there are still a handful of defenders of the dubious practice of abstinence, surely the worst idea since chocolate-covered ants.

Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.

Obviously I’m very grateful ‘Bad Guy’ is doing so well – it’s shocking and surprising and gratifying – but I do think it’s important to try to make the next song that people are gonna be excited about.

Not much shocked me. You know, I worked in a home for Alzheimer’s patients and my dad used to be really into murders and stuff, so I saw dead bodies. It desensitised me to a lot of things.