"War doesn’t decide who is right, war decides who is left."
— Bertrand Russell

"So far as I can remember there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."
— Bertrand Russell

"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."
— Bertrand Russell (Unpopular Essays)

"If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years."
— Bertrand Russell

"It's easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you."
— Bertrand Russell

"A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation."
— Bertrand Russell

"I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached."
— Bertrand Russell

"No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues."
— Bertrand Russell

"If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind, generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.
Bertrand Russell"
— Bertrand Russell

"Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves."
— Bertrand Russell

"The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice."
— Bertrand Russell

"One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways."
— Bertrand Russell

"Pied Beauty—"

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him."
— Gerard Manley Hopkins (The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins)

"And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
"
— Gerard Manley Hopkins (Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works)

"Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life."
— Thomas Mann

"This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected--in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life."
— Thomas Mann

"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."
— D.H. Lawrence

"I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I'm sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual - we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I'm sure that is entirely wrong."
— D.H. Lawrence (Women in Love)

"It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake. "
— D.H. Lawrence

"Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it."
— D.H. Lawrence

"I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze."
— D.H. Lawrence

"Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief"
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving."
— Laozi

"Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know."
— Laozi (Tao Teh Ching)

"To lead people, walk beside them ...
As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence.
The next best, the people honor and praise.
The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate ...
When the best leader's work is done the people say,
'We did it ourselves!'""
— Laozi (Tao Te Ching)

"To know that you do not know is the best.
To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease."
— Laozi

"Loss is not as bad as wanting more."
— Laozi

"To understand the limitation of things, desire them."
— Laozi (Tao Te Ching)

"Those who flow as life flows know they need no other force."
— Laozi

"The flame that burns Twice as bright burns half as long."
— Laozi (Tao Te Ching)

"Manifest plainness,
Embrace simplicity,
Reduce selfishness,
Have few desires."
— Laozi

"To see things in the seed, that is genius."
— Laozi

"the best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up"
— Paul Valéry

"Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error."
— Paul Valéry (The Art of Poetry)

"Power without abuse loses its charm."
— Paul Valéry

"Our judgments judge us; and nothing reveals us [or] exposes our weaknesses more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.

"
— Paul Ambroise Valery

"I am now going to make an admission. I confess, I agree, that all these good people who protested, who laughed, who did not perceive what we perceived, were in a quite legitimate position. Their opinion was quite in order. One must not be afraid to say that the kingdom of letters is only a province of the vast empire of entertainment. One picks up a book, one puts it aside; and even when one cannot put it down one very well understands that this interest is related to the facility of pleasure. That is to say that every effort of a creator of beauty or of fantasy should be bent, by the very essence of his work, on contriving for the public pleasure which demands no effort, or almost none. It is through the public that he should deduce what touches, moves, soothes, animates or enchants the public.

There are however several publics; amongst whom it is not impossible to find some people who do not conceive of pleasure without pain, who do not like to enjoy themselves without paying, and who are not happy if their happiness is not in some part their own contrivance through which they wish to realize what it costs them.
"
— Paul Valéry (Selected Writings of Paul Valery)

"The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be. "
— Paul Valéry

"Common sense is not so common."
— Voltaire

"Ice-cream is exquisite.
What a pity it isn't illegal."
— Voltaire

"A witty saying proves nothing. "
— Voltaire

"God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere."
— Voltaire

"If we believe absurdities we shall commit atrocities."
— Voltaire

"God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh."
— Voltaire

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
— Voltaire

" It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
— Voltaire

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."
— Voltaire

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."
— Voltaire

"Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do."
— Voltaire

"'I should like to know which is worse: to be raped a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgars, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here and do nothing?'
'That is a hard question,' said Candide."
— Voltaire (Candide, or Optimism)