The quote database

We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.

Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion.

Language is our largest common medium, and leads on into literature, which is but preserved speech.

To be surrounded by beautiful things has much influence upon the human creature: to make beautiful things has more.

Yet it is only intelligence and sympathy that can bring us closer to the source of human suffering, and teach us the ultimate way out of it.

Man should make an art of thinking.

Most people consider life a battle, but it is not a battle, it is a game.

A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.

It is not down in any map; true places never are

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.

Yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.

Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”

I was thrown out of work, and now that I had got into the habit of writing I did not know what to make of my spare time.

It’s just as important where we are not as it is where we are.

All sincere and earnest search after truth, even where it fails to reach it, yet, often comes so near to it, that other minds more happily situated may be led, by pointing out its very limitations and errors, to obtain a larger view.

For joy is knowledge in its completeness, it is knowing by our whole being.

All our egoistic impulses, our selfish desires, obscure our true vision of the soul.

But music never has to depend upon any obvious meaning; it expresses what no words can ever express.

The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable Time.

the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing

All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands: seeking for that bird and hearing him.

The goal of mankind is knowledge. That is the one ideal placed before us by Eastern philosophy.

Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.

Extreme altruism is no better and no nobler than extreme selfishness; both are mistakes.

Desire is possibility seeking expression, or function seeking performance.