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.
Live and let live.
The secret of success is constancy to purpose.
It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.
A scholar must be strong and resolute, for his burden is heavy, and his journey is long.
But, always ignorant of our own needs, We ask the heavens for what we need the least.
The mind is often at the heart that what the library of a castle is to the master's person.
Let a child play and mix instruction with play.
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
Happy the man who observes the heavenly and the terrestrial law in just proportion.
In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
Find quotes in french, in german, or in latin. Click on the translation icon.
