Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

One's work is never so bad as it appears on bad days, nor so good as it appears on good days.

The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress.

The man who pursues happiness wisely will aim at the possession of a number of subsidiary interests in addition to those central ones upon which his life is built.

Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

Prophets, mystics, poets, scientific discoverers are men whose lives are dominated by a vision; they are essentially solitary men . . . whose thoughts and emotions are not subject to the dominion of the herd.

Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.