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

The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.

Fear is the denomination of the Old Testament; belief is the denomination of the New.

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.

Some things must be good in themselves, else there could be no measure whereby to lay out good and evil.

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

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.

Another occupation might have been better.

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

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.

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

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 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...

True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.

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 secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.

Conscience without judgment is superstition.

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

The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.

None are so empty as those who are full of themselves.

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.

Eclecticism – every truth is so true that any truth must be false.

Among politicians the esteem of religion is profitable; the principles of it are troublesome.

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

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

The longest sword, the strongest lungs, the most voices, are false measures of truth.