Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.

Craving for power is not a vice of the body, consequently it knows none of the limitations imposed by a tired or satiated physiology upon gluttony, intemperance and lust