I.B. George Quotes

Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.

A simple life is its own reward.

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

Better not be a hero than work oneself up into heroism by shouting lies.

Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.

Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.

Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.

I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.

Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.

All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.

Memory... is an internal rumor.

The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.

Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

Beware of long arguments and long beards.

There is no right government except good government.

It is the acme of life to understand life.

We do right enough darling, if we go wrong together.

The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.

Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.

The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.

Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.

Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.

Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.

To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.

An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.

The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.

A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.

Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything.

Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.

Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.

Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.

There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.

It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.

When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.

To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.

Docility is the observable half of reason.

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.

To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.

You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams.