I made the journey to knowledge like dogs who go for walks with their masters, a hundred times forward and backward over the same territory; and when I arrived I was tired.

The book which most deserved to be banned would be a catalog of banned books.

With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.

Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.

We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.