“It is unwise to feel too much if we think too little.”

An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.

Life is so full of miseries, minor and major; they press so close upon us at every step of the way, that it is hardly worthwhile to call one another’s attention to their presence.

The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.

There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see.

Economics and ethics have little in common.

The pitfall of the feminist is the belief that the interests of men and women can ever be severed; that what brings sufferings to the one can leave the other unscathed.

A real dog, beloved and therefore pampered by his mistress, is a lamentable spectacle. He suffers from fatty degeneration of his moral being.

the most comfortable characteristic of the period [1775-1825], and the one which incites our deepest envy, is the universal willingness to accept a good purpose as a substitute for good work.

When the contemplative mind is a French mind, it is content, for the most part, to contemplate France. When the contemplative mind is an English mind, it is liable to be seized at any moment by an importunate desire to contemplate Morocco or Labrador.

It is bad enough to be bad, but to be bad in bad taste is unpardonable.

real letter-writing … is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another.

History is not written in the interests of morality.

Humor, in one form or another, is characteristic of every nation; and reflecting the salient points of social and national life, it illuminates those crowded corners which history leaves obscure.

Diaries tell their little tales with a directness, a candor, conscious or unconscious, a closeness of outlook, which gratifies our sense of security. Reading them is like gazing through a small clear pane of glass. We may not see far and wide, but we see very distinctly that which comes within our field of vision.

Wit is as infinite as love, and a deal more lasting in its qualities.

Discussion without asperity, sympathy with fusion, gayety unracked by too abundant jests, mental ease in approaching one another; these are the things which give a pleasant smoothness to the rough edge of life.

When you come to Germany as a Jew you have an uneasy feeling, but I’ve always felt okay in Berlin.

I try to be green as much as I can and it’s hard. I feel like I’m never doing enough.

At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first ‘feeling’ for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.

When you’re young everything feels like the end of the world, but its not; its just the beginning.

You got to be brave. If you feel something, you’ve really got to risk it.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

Just as musicians feel about scores and melodies, dancers about the steps and flow of music, so we’re one with the principle of flight, the magic of being aloft in the wind!

Having my animals or my children with me exorcises that feeling of not being wanted.