If anyone spends almost the whole day in reading...he gradually loses the capacity for thinking...This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid

We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Human life, like all inferior goods, is covered on the outside with a false glitter; what suffers always conceals itself.

Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.

It takes place, by and large, with the same sort of necessity as a tree brings forth fruit, and demands of the world no more than a soil on which the individual can flourish.