E

• Marxists profess to reject religion in favor of science, but they cherish a belief that the external universe is evolving with reliable, if not divine necessity in exactly the direction in which they want it to go.
• People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo.

• To live and let live, without clamor for distinction or recognition; to wait on divine Love; to write truth first on the tablet of one's own heart--this is the sanity and perfection of living, and my human ideal.

• Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
• I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
• So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake ... Religion is all bunk.
• My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it.
• Most of our textbooks fail on two big counts. They are not sufficiently human, and their application is not sufficiently practical. Their tendency seems to be to look upon the whole process of education as a job of dull and interesting work--with the apparent argument that the duller and more uninteresting it is made the more credit there is for doing it.
• I never did anything worth doing by accident, not did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.

• Where duty is plain, delay is both foolish and hazardous; where it is not, delay may be both wisdom and safety.
• Firmness in adherence to truth and duty is sometimes mistaken for obstinacy by those who do not comprehend its nature and motive.
• The prejudiced and obstinate man does not so much hold opinions, as his opinions hold him.
• Ridicule may be the evidence of art or bitterness and may gratify a little mind or an ungenerous temper, but it is no test of reason or truth.
• Thoroughly to teach another is the best way to learn for yourself.
• Contemplation is to knowledge what digestion is to food--the way to get life out of it.

• He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
• I do not believe we can have any freedom at all in the philosophical sense, for we act not only under external compulsion but also by inner necessity.
• Mathematics deals exclusively with the relations of concepts to each other without consideration of their relation to experience.
• The man who enjoys marching in line and file to the strains of music falls beneath my contempt; he received his great brain by mistake--the spinal cord would have been amply sufficient.
• To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
• The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.
• A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

• To his press secretary before meeting reporters: "Don't worry, Jim. If that comes up, I'll just confuse them."
• People want peace so much that the government had better get out of their way and let them have it.
• If carried to the logical extreme, the final concentration of ownership in the hands of government gives to it, in all practical effects, absolute power over our lives.

• Reading the epitaphs, our only salvation lies in resurrecting the dead and burying the living.

• Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

• The Christianity that accommodates itself to the culture in the belief that it will thus make itself more acceptable and better understood, and more authentically in touch with humanity--this is not a half-Christianity; it is a total denial of Christianity. Once Christianity gives way to accommodation or humanistic interpretation, the revelation is gone. Christian faith is radical, decisive like the very word of God, or else it is nothing.
• To seek conciliation with the world is to cut off the gospel’s roots. This, of course, assured Catholicism’s worldly success--at the cost of its authenticity.
• I have nothing against the person who prefers to take the way of politics, big business, science, revolution, technology, etc. Only, let him not pretend that he is witnessing to Christian truth. That much honesty can be demanded of him.
• If violence is unleashed anywhere at all, the Christians are always to blame. [For not having intervened in time to defuse it.]
• ... it is impossible to be a Christian and at the same time to conduct successful politics, which necessarily requires the use of some kind of violence.

• Philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery.
• Take egotism out, and you would castrate the benefactors.
• An actually existing fly is more important than a possibly existing angel.
• A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.
• Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
• It is an amiable illusion, which the shape of our planed prompts, that every man is at the top of the world.
• We love flattery, even when we see through it, and are not deceived by it, for it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted.
• To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men--that is genius.
• In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good humored inflexibility the most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.
• Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.
• We find in life exactly what we put in it.
• We do what we can and call it by the best name.
• Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of you own mind.
• Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not be flattered but schooled.
• The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
• Self-command is the main elegance.
• The philosopher and lover of man have harm much to say of trade: but the historian will see that trade was the principle of liberty; that trade planted America and destroyed Feudalism; that it made peace and keeps peace, and it will abolish slavery. We complain of its oppression of the poor, and of its building up a new aristocracy on the ruins of the aristocracy it destroys. But the aristocracy of trade has no permanence, is not entailed, was the result of toil and talent, the result of merit of some kind, and is continually falling, like the waves of the sea, before new claims of the same sort.
• The greatest homage we can pay to truth is to use it.

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

• Leadership is more likely to be assumed by the aggressive than by the able, and those who scramble to the top are more often motivated by their own inner torments than by any demand for their guidance.

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