Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.

Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.

Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.

The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty?