When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.