“God orders a man to do all he can to save his life.”

I am not proud, but I am happy; and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride.

Ah, lips that say one thing, while the heart thinks another.

I prefer the wicked rather than the foolish. The wicked sometimes rest.

The custom and fashion of today will be the awkwardness and outrage of tomorrow – so arbitrary are these transient laws.

If it is ones lot to be cast among fools, one must learn foolishness.

To save a man and thereby to spare a father’s agony and a mother’s feelings is not to do a noble deed, it is but an act of humanity.

The merit of all things lies in their difficulty.

All for one, one for all, that is our device.

Are there not some places where we seem to breathe sadness? – why, we cannot tell. It is a chain of recollections – an idea which carries you back to other times, to other places – which, very likely, have no connection with the present time and place.

Life is a storm. One minute you will bathe under the sun and the next you will be shattered upon the rocks. That’s when you shout, “Do your worst, for I will do mine!” and you will be remembered forever.

Youth is a blossom whose fruit is love; happy is he who plucks it after watching it slowly ripen.

To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.

It is only the dead who do not return.

Capricious and unfaithful, the king wished to be called Louis the Just and Louis the Chaste. Posterity will find a difficulty in understanding this character, which history explains only by facts and never by reason.

Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss.

In love, writing is dangerous, not to mention pointless.

All I have to do to make me feel like a new and younger man is to order three new suits of clothes.

We study history in order to intervene in the course of history.

You have to be able to face losing some things you might want in order to be free to do the right thing.

Like, if I go to a restaurant and I order food, I always just eat one thing at a time.

We support any deal that denies Iran nuclear weapons

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

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

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.