It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big.

He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer's booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.

The man who goes up in a balloon does not feel as if he were ascending; he only sees the earth sinking deeper below him.

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.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake.