One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon hence the constant popularity of dogs.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Science has explained nothing the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.