Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life.

People buy their necessities in shops and have to pay dearly for them because they have to assist in paying for what is also on sale there but only rarely finds purchasers: the luxury and amusement goods. So it is that luxury continually imposes a tax on the simple people who have to do without it.

The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation.

Both classically- and romantically-minded spirits-inasmuch as these two species always exist-occupy themselves with a vision of the future: but the former do so out of a strength of their age, the latter out of its weakness.

Exhaustion is the shortest way to equality and fraternity.

A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.

The genius-in work and in deed-is necessarily a squanderer: the fact that he spends himself constitutes his greatness.