Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.
A good method of discovery is to imagine certain members of a system removed and then see how what is left would behave: for example, where would we be if iron were absent from the world: this is an old example.
Perseverance can lend the appearance of dignity and grandeur to many actions, just as silence in company affords wisdom and apparent intelligence to a stupid person.
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.
If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.
It thunders, howls, roars, hisses, whistles, blusters, hums, growls, rumbles, squeaks, groans, sings, crackles, cracks, rattles, flickers, clicks, snarls, tumbles, whimpers, whines, rustles, murmurs, crashes, clucks, to gurgle, tinkles, blows, snores, claps, to lisp, to cough, it boils, to scream, to weep, to sob, to croak, to stutter, to lisp, to coo, to breathe, to clash, to bleat, to neigh, to grumble, to scrape, to bubble. These words, and others like them, which express sounds are more than mere symbols: they are a kind of hieroglyphics for the ear.
Reading means borrowing.
God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
What I do not like about our definitions of genius is that there is in them nothing of the day of judgment, nothing of resounding through eternity and nothing of the footsteps of the Almighty.
Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
Everyone is perfectly willing to learn from unpleasant experience - if only the damage of the first lesson could be repaired.
People nowadays have such high hopes of America and the political conditions obtaining there that one might say the desires, at least the secret desires, of all enlightened Europeans are deflected to the west, like our magnetic needles.
Many are less fortunate than you' may not be a roof to live under, but it will serve to retire beneath in the event of a shower.
The course of the seasons is a piece of clockwork, with a cuckoo to call when it is spring.
Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.
We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.
Barbaric accuracy - whimpering humility.
Theologians always try to turn the Bible into a book without common sense.
That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.
They do not think, therefore they are not.
I made the journey to knowledge like dogs who go for walks with their masters, a hundred times forward and backward over the same territory; and when I arrived I was tired.
Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming.
A man of spirit must not think of the word difficulty as so much as existing. Away with it!
Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.
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.
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