Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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

The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.

Wisdom comes from disillusionment.

Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.