Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.

It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.

The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.

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

Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.