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.

Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.

Faith is like love: it does not let itself be forced.

There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

There are three stages in the revelation of truth. The first is to be ridiculed, the second is to be resisted and the third is to be considered self-evident.

[T]he moralists of Europe [have] pretended that beasts have no rights... a doctrine revolting/gross/barbarous... on which a native of the Asiatic uplands could not look without righteous horror.