The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite.

The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it.

The ordinary method of education is to imprint ideas and opinions, in the strict sense of the word, prejudices, on the mind of the child, before it has had any but a very few particular observations. It is thus that he afterwards comes to view the world and gather experience through the medium of those ready-made ideas, rather than to let his ideas be formed for him out of his own experience of life, as they ought to be.

It is not what things are objectively and in themselves, but what they are for us, in our way of looking at them, that makes us happy or the reverse.

For it is a matter of daily observation that people take the greatest pleasure in that which satisfies their vanity; and vanity cannot be satisfied without comparison with others.

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject.