Isn't it better to have men being ungrateful than to miss a chance to do good?

You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, so all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals… What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to defer wise resolutions to the fiftieth or sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained.

What is a monster? A being whose survival is incompatible with the existing order.

Instinct guides the animal better than the man. In the animal it is pure, in man it is led astray by his reason and intelligence.

Only the bad man is alone.

Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.

But if you will recall the history of our civil troubles, you will see half the nation bathe itself, out of piety, in the blood of the other half, and violate the fundamental feelings of humanity in order to sustain the cause of God: as though it were necessary to cease to be a man in order to prove oneself religious!