To find everything profound - that is an inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in the end one finds more than one might have wished.

Thus do I want man and woman to be: the one fit to wage war and the other fit to give birth, but both fit to dance with head and feet.

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

In magnanimity there is the same amount of egoism as in revenge, but egoism of a different quality.

The man who sees little always sees less than there is to see; the man who hears badly always hears something more than there is to hear.

One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, average ones to habit, and pretty ones to fear.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.