“What a fine comedy this world would be if one did not play a part in it.”

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.

One cannot live through a long stretch of years without forming some philosophy of life.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

I am a friend of the working man, and I would rather be his friend, than be one.

No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

The critics never ever one time fairly criticized my son.

Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a ‘happy’ one?

It is bigotry for public schools to teach only one theory of origins.

Being wealthy when no one else is, is like being the only one at the party with a drink.