I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree.
The power of the periodical press is second only to that of the people.
All men's misfortunes spring from their hatred of being alone.
Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.
What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.
All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.
And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.
We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own.
There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.
O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!
Cunning... is but the low mimic of wisdom.
The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don't understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it.
I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.
Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.
Love and desire are the spirit's wings to great deeds.
Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?
Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.
When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
There are unknown forces in nature when we give ourselves wholly to her, without reserve, she lends them to us she shows us these forms, which our watching eyes do not see, which our intelligence does not understand or suspect.
It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
We may seem great in an employment below our worth, but we very often look little in one that is too big for us.
I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following.
To love another person is to see the face of God.
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