The most solid pleasure in this life is the empty pleasure of illusion.

Men do not so much hate an evil-doer, or evil itself, as they hate the man who calls evil by its real name.

Men seldom act from a correct sense of what may be harmful or useful to them.

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

No one is so completely disenchanted with the world, or knows it so thoroughly, or is so utterly disgusted with it, that when it begins to smile upon him he does not become partially reconciled to it.

Ignorance is the greatest source of happiness.

Man is almost always as wicked as his needs require.