To become reconciled to a friend with whom you have broken, is a form of weakness; and you pay the penalty of it when he takes the first opportunity of doing precisely the very thing which brought about the breach.

Life is full of troubles and vexations, that one must either rise above it by means of corrected thoughts, or leave it.

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.

In many cases hate a person is rooted in the involuntary estimate of its virtues.

There is in the world only the choice between loneliness and vulgarity. All young people should be taught now to put up with loneliness ... because the less man is compelled to come into contact with others, the better off he is.

Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature. A child under the age of fifteen should confine its attention either to subjects like mathematics, in which errors of judgment are impossible, or to subjects in which they are not very dangerous, like languages, natural science, history, etc.

Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism.