It's not our disadvantages or shortcomings that are ridiculous, but rather the studious way we try to hide them, and our desire to act as if they did not exist.

That is why all great men are modest: they consistently measure themselves not in comparison to other people but to the idea of perfection ever present in their minds, an ideal infinitely clearer and greater than any common people have, and they also realize how far they are from fulfilling their ideal.

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

Everything since Homer has improved, except poetry.

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

Man is almost always as wicked as his needs require.

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.