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

Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.

why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

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

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