To buy books would be a good thing if we could also buy the time to read them; but the purchase of books is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their contents.

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles' Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God's sake, not to inquire further.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.

Most men are so thoroughly subjective that nothing really interests them but themselves.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.