We are always making gods of those who are indifferent to us, and martyrs of those who love us.

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves. It is strange that the most brutal of passions should be the most spiritual.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated. I have just read of a manthe other day picking up an arrowhead on the Assabet, and it suggested the same thoughts as if I had found it myself—that there is something very congenial between the sight of such an object and the human mind.

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well. And the greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as the greatest virtues.

It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners — yet what is health but the name we give to our present ignorance of what ails us?

The universe is not cruel, nor is it kind — it is simply what it is, and we are the creatures who discovered sorrow by learning to want what it cannot give us.

The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to age and die in the same prison is mocked by nature, which proceeds by ceaseless mutation and transformation.

We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against nature.

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well. And the greatest souls are capable of the greatest vices as well as the greatest virtues.

It is not by sitting still at a grand distance and calling the human race larvae that a man gets to know anything about them.

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and now the machine is reinventing us.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are angered by their absence and immediately go in search of them.

The true paradox of the machine is that it was created to serve man, yet it has enslaved him to its rhythms and demands; we have made ourselves the appendages of our own inventions.

The mysterious fact about the human being is that he is not content to be a human being—he wants to be a human being plus something else. He wants to transcend himself, and the usual way he tries to do this is to become part of an even larger organism, a social group.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are angered by their absence and appalled by alien forms; which love them when found, but will have none of them when not directly forced upon us.

The human mind is a dark forest, full of wild life and monsters. We do not know what we are, we can only see small lights in the forest of our unconsciousness, as it were luminous, phosphorescent flowers and night-blossoms.

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and now the machine is bent on inventing us.

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and the machine now invents us. We do not live, we are lived.

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine and the machine has possessed us, and we must either slay the machine or ourselves.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel all their actions, all their sufferings.

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine and now we are ourselves parts of the machine.

A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for? The appetite grows with eating; the more one has, the more one wants.

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents; we have invented the machine, and now the machine is in the process of reinventing us.

The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past, all the future, all the possibilities of existence.

We are dying from civilisation and its discontents. The machine has possessed us, and we must either master it or perish.

The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What he has to do is to accept it or reject it, take it or leave it.

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. Every man is wise when attacked by a disease from which he is never likely to suffer.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel every quiver that passes through them as a shock to our own nerves.

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of things, and reject others. It natively loves and hates, it seeks and shuns, and these operations are as primitive as any that the mind performs.

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

The poets make all the words, and therefore language is the indelible record of mankind's being.

The best business decisions come from a place of genuine insight about human nature and incentives, not from financial models. Most people optimize for the wrong things because they haven't thought carefully about what they actually want.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.