There are those who understand everything till one puts it into words

I am glad to think my work has been of use to anyone. But that it deserves the time & trouble involved in an elaborate study I find difficult to believe. In other words the...

The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.

The whole book was rather crude & hasty but how far it really was less useful on that account I don’t know.

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart’s blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

Another occupation might have been better.

One said of suicide, ”As long as one has brains one should not blow them out.” And another answered, ”But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.”

It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himself.

We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.

An aphorism is true where it has fixed the impression of a genuine experience

There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.

The mood in which my book was conceived and executed, was in fact to some extent a passing one.

There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.

The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one’s own mind.

The propriety of some persons seems to consist in having improper thoughts about their neighbors

Eclecticism. Every truth is so true that any truth must be false.

Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often...

The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.