Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.
Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.
The wisdom of providence is as much revealed in the rarity of genius, as in the circumstance that not everyone is deaf or blind.
It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.
What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.
The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit; the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.
To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.
The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin.
Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.
Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.
Do not take too artificial a view of mankind but judge them from a natural standpoint, deeming them neither over good nor over bad.
Popular presentation today is all too often that which puts the mob in a position to talk about something without understanding it.
I would give something to know for whose sake precisely those deeds were really done which report says were done for the fatherland.
With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.
Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.
To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.
It is a great shame; most of our words are misused tools / which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners / desecrated them.
Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.
A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.
The fruits of philosophy are the important thing, not the philosophy itself. When we ask the time, we don't want to know how watches are made.
The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.
We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.
The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.
The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.
One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being.
You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.
I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me. In each of us there is a little of all of us.
If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read.
There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.
Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.
It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.
A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.
Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoiter the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.
The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate.
It is in most cases more difficult to make intelligent people believe that you are what you are not, than really to become what you would appear to be.
It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.
The world is a body common to all men, changes to it bring about a change in the souls of all men who are turned towards that part of it at that moment.
The girl who reveals herself heart and soul to her friend reveals the secrets of the entire sex; for every girl is the guardian of the feminine mysteries.
No people are more conceited than those who depict their own feelings, especially if they happen to have a little prose at their command for the occasion.
What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?
Pain warns us not to exert our limbs to the point of breaking them. How much knowledge would we not need to recognize this by the exercise of mere reason.
The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.
There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.
What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?
Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.
There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.