Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.
One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.
Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it, for nothing is made worse or better by praise.
Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.
Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
In this country it is a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.
Purity of personal life is the one indispensable condition for building up a sound education.
The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.
There is no original truth, only original error.
Toleration is the best religion.
There is no better proof of a man's being truly good than his desiring to be constantly under the observation of good men.
Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.
There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.
I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve.
We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.
False happiness renders men stern and proud, and that happiness is never communicated. True happiness renders them kind and sensible, and that happiness is always shared.
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
From the gut comes the strut, and where hunger reigns, strength abstains.
The sublimity of administration consists in knowing the proper degree of power that should be exerted on different occasions.
The spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires change of heart.
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.
We must laugh before we are happy, for fear of dying without having laughed at all.
I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.
Money is like manure, of very little use except it be spread.
Here is the rule to remember in the future, When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, 'This is a misfortune' but 'To bear this worthily is good fortune.'
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
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