“My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.”

Shakespeare’s fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.

The best doctor is the one you run to and can’t find.

The world is the house of the strong.

Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.

Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.

Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.

In order to get as much fame as one’s father one has to much more able than he.

Only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small-minded.

Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: ‘My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.’ This stranger is a theologian.

Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.

There is only one virtue, justice; only one duty, to be happy; only one corollary, not to overvalue life and not to fear death.

Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world.

You can be sure that a painter reveals himself in his work as much as and more than a writer does in his.

When we know to read our own hearts, we acquire wisdom of the heartsof others.

There are cats and cats.

There’s always a bittersweet kind of thing, but I feel like everything had to work out the way it is. Everything that had to happen, happened.

The way the world is right now, we need more love.

Submission is the willingness to give up our right to ourselves, to freely surrender our insistence on having our own way all the time.

The way you begin each day defines how you’ll live each day.

In a way my reputation has become that of the curmudgeon.

You didn’t break my heart, I did. It was the only way to let you out of it.

But fates are connected in ways we don’t understand.

There are people who have let the problems of today lead them to conclude that for them life is not the way.