One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.
Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.
To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.
I am grateful that I am not as judgmental as all those censorious, self-righteous people around me. In each of us there is a little of all of us.
Never undertake anything unless you have the heart to ask Heaven's blessing on your undertaking.
We judge nothing so hastily as character, and yet there is nothing over which we should be more cautious.... I have always found that the so-called bad people improve on closer acquaintance, while the good fall off.
Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.
Nowadays beautiful women are counted among the talents of their husbands.
A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.
With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.
A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.
When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.
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 more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.
A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.
We have to believe that everything has a cause, as the spider spins its web in order to catch flies. But it does this before it knows there are such things as flies.
It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.
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.
If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read.
To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.
There is something in the character of every man which cannot be broken in--the skeleton of his character; and to try to alter this is like training a sheep for draught purposes.
If nature be regarded as the teacher and we poor human beings as her pupils, the human race presents a very curious picture. We all sit together at a lecture and possess the necessary principles for understanding it, yet we always pay more attention to the chatter of our fellow students than to the lecturer's discourse. Or, if our neighbor copies something down, we sneak it from him, stealing what he himself may have heard imperfectly, and add it to our own errors of spelling and opinion.
If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.
There is a great difference between believing in something and believing in it again.
The drive to propagate our race has also propagated a lot of other things
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