If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.

There is one respect in which beasts show real wisdom... their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.

If there is anything in the world that can really be called a man's property, it is surely that which is the result of his mental activity.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every remeeting a foretaste of the resurrection. That is why even people who are indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they meet again after twenty or thirty years of separation.

The faculty for remembering is not diminished in proportion to what one has learnt, just as little as the number of moulds in which you cast sand lessens its capacity for being cast in new moulds.

It is not what things are objectively and in themselves, but what they are for us, in our way of looking at them, that makes us happy or the reverse.

The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.