Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible.
I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.
There is a great difference between believing in something and believing in it again.
It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.
As soon as you know a man to be blind, you imagine that you can see it from his back.
If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
To write brashly about some things, it is almost necessary not to know much about them.
With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.
One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.
Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older.
Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets an enormous erection.
I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.
The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.
Nothing reveals a man's character better than the kind of joke at which he takes offense.
What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.
The course of the seasons is a piece of clockwork, with a cuckoo to call when it is spring.
A man of spirit must not think of the word difficulty as so much as existing. Away with it!
The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.
Above all things expand the frontiers of science: without this the rest counts for nothing.
The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.
The human tendency to regard little things as important has produced very many great things.
The worst thing you can possibly do is worrying and thinking about what you could have done.
He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals.
Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.
There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face.
Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.
He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.
Is it so unjust that a man should leave the world by the same gate through which he entered it?
A good part of the fame of most celebrated men is due to the shortsightedness of their admirers
Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.
The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.
Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.
Never undertake anything unless you have the heart to ask Heaven's blessing on your undertaking.
To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.
One should never trust a person who, while assuring you of something, puts his hands on his heart.
How might letters be most efficiently copied so that the blind might read them with their fingers?
Knowledge acquired too rapidly and without being personally supplemented is never very productive.
He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp.
The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them.
What we are able to judge with feeling is very little; the rest is all prejudice and complaisance.
It is too bad if you have to do everything upon reflection and can't do anything from early habit.
I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.
We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.
If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.
When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?
A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.
The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of the plant.
Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.
A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.
How few friends would remain friends if each could see the sentiments of the other in their entirety.