To see every day how people get the name 'genius' just as the wood-lice in the cellar the name 'millipede'-not because they have that many feet, but because most people don't want to count to 14-this has had the result that I don't believe anyone any more without checking.

As soon as you know a man to be blind, you imagine that you can see it from his back.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

The course of the seasons is a piece of clockwork, with a cuckoo to call when it is spring.

Nowadays beautiful women are counted among the talents of their husbands.

We have to believe that everything has a cause, as the spider spins its web in order to catch flies. But it does this before it knows there are such things as flies.