aphorism

We say sound things when we do not strive to say to say extraordinary ones.

To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.

All Excess is ill: But Drunkenness is of the worst Sort.

Happiness can not be prescribed, postponed or preserved.Relish its unpredictability. Cherish its exclusivity. Accept its brevity. But above all savour its delicious exquisiteness. Do not let it go cold!

An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.

A journal takes the place of a confidant, that is, of friend or wife; it becomes a substitute for production, a substitute for country and public. It is a grief-cheating device, a mode of escape and withdrawal; but, factotum as it is, though it takes the place of everything, properly speaking it represents nothing at all...

The Vine of Life grows a single melon. The color of the heart is unknown until the rind is split.

The shortest distance between two points is always under construction.

Prohibition is to abstain from intoxicating liquor, as it makes us morbid and sometimes drunk. But we get drunk every day, nevertheless, not so much by the strength of what we sip from the cup, but that which we eat, the water we drink, and the air we inhale, which at fermentation conspire at eventide to make us so drunk and tired that we lose control of ourselves and fall asleep. Everybody is a drunkard, and if we were to enforce real prohibition we should all be dead.

Almost everything we call "higher culture" is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.

A good night's sleep counts healthy sheep.

What I say will be a bit of boasting. The mad wine tells me to do it. Wine sets even a thoughtful man to singing, or sets him into softly laughing, sets him to dancing. Sometimes it tosses out a word that was better unspoken.

I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this "great majority." But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress__s that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.Among some pious people I found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing__hat is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my type of injustice.

If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.

Beware of finding what you're lookin

The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom among us is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority...

An aphorism needn't be true, but it should sound true.

To come up with one great sentence, one needs to serve a life sentence.