If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters.

Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.

Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.

If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.