Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.

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 have never yet met anyone who did not think it was an agreeable sensation to cut tinfoil with scissors.

It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard.

Ambition and suspicion always go together.

It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.