A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

It is a wearisome disease to preserve health by too strict a regimen.

The gallantry of the mind consists in agreeable flattery.

We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others.

As we grow older we grow both more foolish and wiser at the same time.

Men are not only prone to forget benefits; they even hate those who have obliged them, and cease to hate those who have injured them. The necessity of revenging an injury, or of recompensing a benefit seems a slavery to which they are unwilling to submit.

There are few people more convinced of their own genius than those who complain of how stupid they are.