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.

If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.

The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.

After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?

One of the greatest creations of the human mind is the art of reviewing books without having read them.

If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.

To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.