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.
We seldom find any person of good sense, except those who share our opinions.
To be good is noble but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
Men show their character in nothing more clearly than what they think laughable.
Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.
I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.
Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.
Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see.
A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
All the religions of the world, while they may differ in other respects, unitedly proclaim that nothing lives in this world but Truth.
Those that have had great passions esteem themselves for the rest of their lives fortunate and unfortunate in being cured of them.
Leisure is the time for doing something useful. This leisure the diligent person will obtain the lazy one never.
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
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