One can live in this world on soothsaying but not on truth saying.
I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.
It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.
If this is philosophy it is at any rate a philosophy that is not in its right mind.
We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.
The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are very often made aloud.
The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.
Human pride is a strange thing; it cannot easily be suppressed, and if you stop up hole A will peep forth again in a twinkling from another hole B, and if this is closed it is ready to come out at hole C, and so on.
It is in most cases more difficult to make intelligent people believe that you are what you are not, than really to become what you would appear to be.
Do not take too artificial a view of mankind but judge them from a natural standpoint, deeming them neither over good nor over bad.
How might letters be most efficiently copied so that the blind might read them with their fingers?
The "second sight" possessed by the Highlanders in Scotland is actually a foreknowledge of future events. I believe they possess this gift because they don't wear trousers.
As soon as you know a man to be blind, you imagine that you can see it from his back.
The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit; the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.
Everyone should study at least enough philosophy and belles-lettres to make his sexual experience more delectable.
I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.
He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.
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.
The wisdom of providence is as much revealed in the rarity of genius, as in the circumstance that not everyone is deaf or blind.
Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be re-taught when the students become teachers.
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 all in a single word.
I have never yet met anyone who did not think it was an agreeable sensation to cut tinfoil with scissors.
There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face.
Some people read only because they are too lazy to think.
Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.
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