The most solid pleasure in this life is the empty pleasure of illusion.
Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.
He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much a master of the world as he who is ready to die.
Everything since Homer has improved, except poetry.
Freedom is the dream you dream While putting thought in chains again --
The old man, especially if he is in society in the privacy of his thoughts, though he may protest the opposite, never stops believing that, through some singular exception of the universal rule, he can in some unknown and inexplicable way still make an impression on women.