One begins to mistrust very clever people when they become embarrassed.

Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu , virtue free of moral acid).

A man who possesses genius is insufferable unless he also possesses at least two other things: gratitude and cleanliness.

Marriage marks the end of many short follies - being one long stupidity.

Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetorician out of necessity, constantly aroused by the craving for a strong faithas well as by the feeling of an incapacity for it (Min this respect a typical romantic!).... Fundamentally, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes it a point of honor not to be one.

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. the will to a system is a lack of integrity.

The usual false conclusions of mankind are these: a thing exists, therefore it has a right to exist.