Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.

The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.

There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws of a dragon.

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.