A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.

To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true...

Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me.

One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the...

There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you...

He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

Theologians always try to turn the Bible into a book without common sense.

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.

Man loves company, even if it is only that of a smoldering candle.

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out...

Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both...

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

Some theories are good for nothing except to be argued about.

Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.

To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his...

Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.

The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world’s greatest events are not produced, they happen.

As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a...

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up…

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down...

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

Before we blame we should first see whether we cannot excuse.

People who never have any time on their hands are those who do the least.

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it...

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul...

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don’t we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other...

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.