It is the very essence of intelligence to coordinate means with a view to a remote end, and to undertake what it does not feel absolutely sure of carrying out.

The only cure for vanity is laughter. And the only fault that's laughable is vanity.

In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.

You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.

Is it astonishing that, like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands, philosophers so often see the object they would grasp fly before them?

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.