There is no man more complete than the one who travelled a lot, who changed the shape of his thoughts and his life twenty times.
When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know.
The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.
Stones are hollowed out by the constant dropping of water.
No one can answer for his courage when he has never been in danger.
Our thoughts are free.
What Nature is to the mind she is also to the body.
A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.
The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.
He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.
What one refuses in a minute No eternity will return.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
I have invariably found that, all else failing, a man's character can be deduced from nothing so surely as from a jest that he takes in bad part.
Light griefs are loquacious, but the great are dumb.
You must acquire the best knowledge first, and without delay; it is the height of madness to learn what you will later have to unlearn.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair.
One cannot prevent people from thinking what they please.
Every age has its pleasures, its style of wit, and its own ways.
Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.
I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it.
Love is merely a madness.
We do not do what we want and nonetheless we are responsible for what we are.
Beauty is mainly no more than simplicity.
Without the laughter, there would be no Tao.
I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.
Man is a sociable, no less than a reasonable being.
It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.
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