Echoes

People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

What speaks to the soul escapes our measurements.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

It is not things that disturb us, but our judgments about things. For example, death is nothing terrible, for if it were, it would have appeared so to Socrates; but the judgment that death is terrible — that is the terrible thing.

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

It is not truth that makes man great, but man that makes truth great.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice familiar to his soul.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

You can be totally rational with a machine. But if you work with people, sometimes logic often has to take a backseat to understanding.

Men are at variance with the one thing with which they are in the most unbroken communion, the reason that administers the whole universe.

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.

History is largely a record of human behavior, and human behavior has not greatly changed.

All men by nature desire to know.

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

There is not love of life without despair about life.