Console yourself by remembering that the world doesn't deserve your affection.

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.

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

There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.

In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.

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. ... The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say.

Man is the only animal who causes pain to others with no other object than wanting to do so.