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.

I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.

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

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.