When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.

Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

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

Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.

There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws of a dragon.