The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.

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

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. ... The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say.

There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.

Money is human happiness in the abstract.

That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom . . .

Life is a language in which certain truths are conveyed to us; if we could learn them in some other way, we should not live.