“I never felt that there was anything enviable in youth. I cannot recall that any of us, as youths, admired our condition to excess or had a desire to prolong it.”

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.

[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.

Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.

Miracles happen to those who believe in them.

German is of stone, limestone, pudding stone, marble, granite even, and so to a considerable degree is English, whereas French is bronze and gives out a metallic resonance with tones that neither German nor English tolerate.

Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.

We usually meet all of our relatives only at funerals where somebody always observes: “Too bad we can’t get together more often”.

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.

A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.

International affairs will be placed on a better footing when it is understood that there is no way of punishing a people for the crimes of its rulers.

No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art…our world would have remained a jungle.

Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.

Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.

As I got warmed up, and felt perfectly at home in talk, I heard myself boasting, lying, exaggerating. Oh, not deliberately, far from it. It would be unconvivial and dull to stop and arrest the flow of talk, and speak only after carefully considering whether I was telling the truth.

Those who have an excessive faith in their theories or in their ideas are not only poorly disposed to make discoveries, but they also make very poor observations.

If a man has a weak arm, give him a heavy hammer to exceed himself!

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem.

Honors achieved far exceed those that are created.

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.

When your memories exceed your dreams, the end is near.

What we suffer from today is an excess of education.

The sweetest things become the most bitter by excess.