If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me.

If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.

You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.