Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be.

Men don't achieve truth because they lack humility and love of truth. They won't criticize their own beliefs. Truth would overwhelm them.

Our life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in penetrating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless and the eternal.

To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits.

Great men are the real men, in them nature has succeeded.

Are we not all shipwrecked,...condemned to death?... However impatient our neighbours make us, however much indignation our race arouses, we are all bound together, and the companions of a chain-gang have everything to lose by mutual insults.

In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past - a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.