By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.

It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.