The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
A man's worth is no greater than his ambitions.
Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.
Taste may change, but inclination never.
The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.
God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Women are tenacious, and all of them should be tenacious of respect without esteem they cannot exist esteem is the first demand that they make of love.
An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.
I want my food dead. Not sick, not dying, dead.
We come altogether fresh and raw into the several stages of life, and often find ourselves without experience, despite our years.
An angry father is most cruel towards himself.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.
I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.
Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.
All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
Violent men have not been known in history to die to a man. They die up to a point.
The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life - knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.
In most things success depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed.
What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.
Time spent with cats is never wasted.
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.
Let every eye negotiate for itself and trust no agent.
To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.
One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.
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