A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.

Pain warns us not to exert our limbs to the point of breaking them. How much knowledge would we not need to recognize this by the exercise of mere reason.

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.

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

Too much is unwholesome.