For, after all, the foundation of our whole nature, and, therefore, of our happiness, is our physique, and the most essential factor in happiness is health, and, next in importance after health, the ability to maintain ourselves in independence and freedom from care.

Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes.

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.

The conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another.

A man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount, is, in the strict sense of the word, what is called a philistine.

Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance.