For our improvement we need a mirror.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

The bad thing about all religions is that, instead of being able to confess their allegorical nature, they have to conceal it.

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

Every human perfection is allied to a defect into which it threatens to pass, but it is also true that every defect is allied to a perfection.

Music is the answer to the mystery of life. The most profound of all the arts, It expresses the deepest thoughts of life.

A man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with mast and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.