The fruits of philosophy are the important thing, not the philosophy itself. When we ask the time, we don't want to know how watches are made.

If nature be regarded as the teacher and we poor human beings as her pupils, the human race presents a very curious picture. We all sit together at a lecture and possess the necessary principles for understanding it, yet we always pay more attention to the chatter of our fellow students than to the lecturer's discourse. Or, if our neighbor copies something down, we sneak it from him, stealing what he himself may have heard imperfectly, and add it to our own errors of spelling and opinion.

Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.

Marriage, in contrast to the flu, starts with a fever and ends with the chills.

How did mankind ever come by the idea of liberty? What a grand thought it was!

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.