The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.

Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.

To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.

It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.

We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.

Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.