What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has or how he is regarded by others.

Every genius is a great child; he gazes out at the world as something strange, a spectacle, and therefore with purely objective interest

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts.

It is, indeed, only in old age that intellectual men attain their sublime expression, whilst portraits of them in their youth show only the first traces of it.

Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.

Restlessness is the hallmark of existence.