The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

Beware of long arguments and long beards.

Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?

There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor's chair.

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

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.