Praise is more obtrusive than a reproach.

A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at five or six great men- yes, and then to get around them.

Verily, I do not want to be like the ropemakers: They drag out their threads and always walk backwards.

You implanted your highest goal into the heart of those passions: then they became your virtues and joys.

My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.

Precisely this is godliness--that there are gods, but no God.

We labour at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.