Nothing in the world is so rare as a person one can always put up with.

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

Man is doomed either squander his youth, which is the only time he has to store provisions for the coming years and provide for his own well-being, or to spend his youth procuring pleasures in advance for that time of life when he will be too old to enjoy them.

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.

Men are ready to suffer anything from others or from heaven itself, provided that, when it comes to words, they are untouched.

He who travels much has this advantage over others – that the things he remembers soon become remote, so that in a short time they acquire the vague and poetical quality which is only given to other things by time. He who has not traveled at all has this disadvantage – that all his memories are of things present somewhere, since the places with which all his memories are concerned are present.

I may be wrong, but it seems rare in our age to find a widely praised person whose own mouth is not the source of that praise.