Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.

A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people.

Genuine contempt, on the other hand, is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher.

Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life.

The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every remeeting a foretaste of the resurrection. That is why even people who are indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they meet again after twenty or thirty years of separation.