Where there is no love, a person's faithfulness to the marriage bond is probably against nature.

That arithmetic is the basest of all mental activities is proved by the fact that it is the only one that can be accomplished by a machine.

Boredom is an evil that is not to be estimated lightly. It can come in the end to real despair. The public authority takes precautions against it everywhere, as against other universal calamities.

First the truth is ridiculed. Then it meets outrage. Then it is said to have been obvious all along.

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.

Many books 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.

Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves; therefore the former make us universally popular, the latter unpopular.