Some mothers need happy children; others need unhappy ones-otherwise they cannot prove their maternal virtues.

If that glad message of your Bible were written in your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion.

There are two types of genius; one which above all begets and wants to beget, and another which prefers being fertilized and giving birth.

What someone is, begins to be revealed when his talent abates, when he stops showing us what he can do.

I despise mystics, they fancy themselves so deep, when they aren't even superficial.

Only great pain is, as the teacher of great suspicion, the ultimate liberator of the spirit...I doubt whether such pain improves us-but I do know it deepens us.

The broad effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast, are the increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery of the desires; so it is that punishment tames man, but does not make him "better.".