The meaning of politics is freedom.
It is very true that we ought to think of the happiness of others; but it is not often enough said that the best thing we can do for those who love us is to be happy ourselves.
May I venture at this point to state the greatest, the most important, the most useful rule of education? It is: do not save time, but lose it.
People who want something strongly enough are almost always well served by chance.
All good things are wild and free.
Greatness is a road leading towards the unknown.
Children should always show great forbearance toward grown-up people.
Asses would rather have straw than gold.
A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.
Fortune only changes for those who do not know how to conform to their times.
Everything in the world depends on bright ideas and firm decisions.
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
A hungry stomach cannot hear.
The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.
Take courage from this despair.
In the arena of human life the honors and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action.
Perhaps men entertain as many truths as falsehoods; have as many good qualities as bad; feel as many pleasures as pains. But we like to malign human nature, in order to try to raise ourselves above the common level, and to acquire for ourselves the respect of which we strive to rob it. We are so presumptuous, that we imagine we can separate our own personal interests from those of humanity in general, and malign the human race without implicating ourselves. This absurd vanity has filled books of philosophy with diatribes against human nature. Man is in disgrace with all thinkers, who rival one another in accusing him of depravity. But perhaps he may be about to rise again and recover all his virtues; nothing is permanent, and philosophy, like clothes, music, architecture, &c, has its vogues.
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Silence is the safest course for any man to adopt who distrusts himself.
Consistency is the foundation of virtue.
States are doomed when they are unable to distinguish good men from bad.
When one speaks of awakening, it means de-hypnotisation, coming to your senses, but of course to do that you have to go out of your mind.
To a Friend of Light If you want to spare your eyes and your mind, follow the sun from the shadows behind.
He who steps upon his misery stands higher.
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
Pleasure is the beginning and end of the blessed life.
A man's nature runs either to herbs or weeds; therefore let him seasonably water the one, and destroy the other.
Time flies and draws us with it. The moment in which I am speaking is already far from me.
An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.
One does not exist without doing something,
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