Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me.

You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.

You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists.

That man is prudent who neither hopes nor fears anything from the uncertain events of the future.

Yet, every now and then, there would pass a young girl, slender, fair and desirable, arousing in young men a not ignoble desire to possess her, and stirring in old men regrets for ecstasy not seized and now forever past.

Distrust even Mathematics; albeit so sublime and highly perfected, we have here a machine of such delicacy it can only work in vacuo, and one grain of sand in the wheels is enough to put everything out of gear. One shudders to think to what disaster such a grain of sand may bring a Mathematical brain. Remember Pascal.

Unhappiness does make people look stupid.