Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.

O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There is something ticklish in "the truth," and in the SEARCH for the truth; and if man goes about it too humanely-"il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien"-I wager he finds nothing!

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 surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

This woman is beautiful and clever: but how much cleverer she would have become if she were not beautiful!

Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.

In every party there is one person who, through his dotingly credulous enunciation of party principles, incites the other members to defection.