God creates the animals, man creates himself.
If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.
Brevity: To say at once whatever is to be said.
It is a great shame; most of our words are misused tools / which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners / desecrated them.
Do not judge God's world from your own. Trim your own hedge as you wish and plant your flowers in the patterns you can understand, but do not judge the garden of nature from your little window box.
The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.
There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.
Why does a suppurating lung give so little warning and a sore on the finger so much?
The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread."
The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of the plant.
A man has virtues enough if he deserves pardon for his faults on account of them.
Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.
There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face. ... It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth ... into a liar - that I call an achievement.
Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.
What makes our poetry so contemptible nowadays is its paucity of ideas. If you want to be read, invent. Who the Devil wouldn't like to read something new?
A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed.
Truly, men make too little use of their lives; and so it is no wonder that the world should still be in such a poor way.
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 in him.
The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.
What you have been obliged to discover by yourself leaves a path in your mind which you can use again when the need arises.
Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.
A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.
People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things.
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