Nature, with her customary beneficence, has ordained that man shall not learn how to live until the reasons for living are stolen from him, that he shall find no enjoyment until he has become incapable of vivid pleasure.

Old age is the supreme evil, for it deprives man of all pleasures while allowing his appetites to remain, and it brings with it every possible sorrow. Yet men fear death and desire old age.

If content with himself and mankind, a man is never harsh or curt.

Children find everything in nothing; men find nothing in everything.

I find it awfully difficult to determine if the habit of talking about oneself at length runs contrary to the basic rules of propriety, or if instead the man exempt from this vice is rare.

Every man remembers his childhood as a kind of mythical age, just as every nation's childhood is its mythical age.

The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one s own knowledge is not to overstep them.