For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.
To free a person from error is to give, and not to take away.
Journalists are like dogs, when ever anything moves they begin to bark.
The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.
Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see.
Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.
The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.
Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.
Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.
It's the niceties that make the difference fate gives us the hand, and we play the cards.
Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!
Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.
The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.
Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.
Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.
It is only a man's own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else's meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.
In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.
The word of man is the most durable of all material.