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

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

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.

Religion is rather the attempt to express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect of our being.

My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside… the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

Up to a certain point every man is what he thinks he is.

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

The Self has turned out to mean so many things, to mean them so ambiguously, and to be so wavering in its application, that we do not feel encouraged.

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

The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.

There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.

I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.

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.

The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.

But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.

Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.

The propriety of some persons seems to consist in having improper thoughts about their neighbors.

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.

We live in a broken world full of broken people. But isn’t it comforting to know God isn’t ever broken? He isn’t ever caught off guard, taken by surprise, or shocked by what happens next.

I continue to form a column. If the column contains about twenty of these couples of metal, it will be capable of giving to the fingers several small shocks.

Some people can be reasoned into sense, and others must be shocked into it.

I am shocking, impertinent and insolent that’s how it is.

Laughter is the shock absorber that eases the blows of life.