Still, instead of trusting what their own minds tell them, men have as a rule a weakness for trusting others who pretend to supernatural sources of knowledge.

Gaiety alone, as it were, is the hard cash of happiness; everything else is just a promissory note.

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

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

Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism.

The young should early be trained to bear being left alone; for it is a source of happiness and peace of mind.

If the lives of men were relieved of all need, hardship and adversity; if everything they took in hand were successful, they would be so swollen with arrogance that, though they might not burst, they would present the spectacle of unbridled folly-nay, they would go mad. And I may say, further, that a certain amount of care or pain or trouble is necessary for every man at all times. A ship without ballast is unstable and will not go straight.