Every original idea is first ridiculed, then vigorously attacked, and finally taken for granted.

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

If a man wants to read good books, he must make a point of avoiding bad ones; for life is short, and time and energy limited.

Poverty and slavery are thus only two forms ofthe same thing, the essence of which is that a man's energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Every woman while she would be ready to die of shame if surprised in the act of generation, nonetheless carries her pregnancy without a trace of shame and indeed with a kind of pride. The reason is that pregnancy is in a certain sense a cancellation of the guilt incurred by coitus; thus coitus bears all the shame and disgrace of the affair, while pregnancy, which is so intimately associated with it, stays pure and innocent and is indeed to some extent sacred.