As nations improve, so do their gods.

There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.

Brevity: To say at once whatever is to be said.

A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.