Philosophy
Lovers!
Click Here

Useful Half-Truths

To a happy soul, pleasures are no longer necessary; to a pleasure-seeking soul, happiness is not yet possible.

The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

Pascal

To love is to suffer, to be loved is to cause suffering.

Countess Diane

One must choose in life between boredom and suffering.

Mme de Staël

Work never hurt anyone. It’s lack of it that destroys people.

Katharine Hepburn

Work is a product of misery, and discontent. I only work because I’m unhappy. If I was happy I should never work.

Malcolm Muggeridge

It is better to do nothing than to do harm. Half the useful work in the world consists of combatting the harmful work.

Bertrand Russell

LABOUR: one of the processes by which A acquires property for B.

Ambrose Bierce

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.

Oscar Wilde

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong and that ninety-nine per cent of them are wrong.

H. L. Mencken

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell.

Bertrand Russell

People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.

Richard Nixon

Every nation has the government it deserves.

Joseph de Maistre

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

H. L. Mencken

We are governed by bloody fools wirepulled by damned thieves.

George Bernard Shaw

Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice.

Edward Bond

You get only the amount of justice you can afford, no more, no less.

Wilfrid Sheed

The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.

G. K. Chesterton

There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiless, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the public.

William Hazlitt

To be angry is to be wrong.

Hugh Kingsmill

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

Bertrand Russell

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed.

Samuel Johnson

This world is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.

Horace Walpole

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

Sir Walter Raleigh

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Susan Ertz

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

George Bernard Shaw

Art is like morality. Both consist in deciding where to draw the line.

G. K. Chesterton

When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgement.

John F. Kennedy

The whole meaning of literature is simply to cut a long story short.

G. K. Chesterton

Art is a continuation of politics by other means.

Adolf Hitler

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

Georges Simenon

As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.

Albert Schweitzer

When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.

Sigmund Freud

RELIGION: Insurance in this world against fire in the next.

There are no entirely false opinions.

Josef Pieper

There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

A. N. Whitehead

To talk quite reasonably about your own quite real wrongs is the quickest way to go off your head.

G. K. Chesterton

A man has his beliefs: his arguments are only his excuses for them.

George Bernard Shaw

The mind is always the dupe of the heart.

La Rochefoucauld

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence.

G. K. Chesterton

In the end it is not argument that convinces us, but people.

John Henry Newman

The first condition of right thought is right sensation.

T. S. Eliot

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences.

Edward R. Murrow

Experience takes away more than it adds; young people are nearer ideas than old men.

Plato

Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.

James Thurber

Nature hates Mind. Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease.

Oscar Wilde

Nothing is serious except passion. The intellect is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.

Oscar Wilde

The closest we can get to impartiality is admitting we are partial.

G. K. Chesterton

Metaphysics is the only thoroughly emotional thing.

G. K. Chesterton

Click HERE to reach the associated topic for this webpage.
For more topics click HERE.