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

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

What has not been examined impartially has not been well examined. Skepticism is therefore the first step towards truth.

The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.

Does not vanity itself cease to be blamable, is it not even ennobled, when it is directed to laudable objects, when it confines itself to prompting us to great and generous actions?

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

Poetry needs something on the scale of the grand, the barbarous, the savage.

Skepticism is the first step on the road to philosophy.

The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population.

A thing is not proved because no one has ever questioned it. Skepticism is the first step toward truth.

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

It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.

Two qualities essential for the artist: moralityand perspective.

One composition is meagre, though it has many figures; another is rich, though it has few.

Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high.

The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.

I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.

No man or woman should be sentenced to the shadows of silence for something he or she has said or written.

I realized that he was writing about good people doing good things. This did not match my experience of life and so I found my sentences stretching and becoming less plain.

The way this whole novel thing came together was, I sold them one bill of goods and then didn’t communicate very well. I am like Captain Run-on Sentence.

Censorship is saying: “I’m the one who says the last sentence. Whatever you say, the conclusion is mine.” But the internet is like a tree that is growing.

The public one and the secret one, and you can dictate a sentence prepared by the political and security apparatuses that are behind this trial.

I now find myself looking at every sentence, every image, that purports to tell the West about the Arabs and the Muslims with this question in mind: to what extent does it feed into existing stereotypes and established prejudice?

Practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.

The writer has to choose the right words to express his sentences, and then, once he has sealed the envelope, he has to place those thoughts in the hands of someone else,