There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

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

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.