Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.

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

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.

Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.

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

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.

The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.