If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.

At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study.

There are 2 sorts of pride: one in which we approve others, the other in which we cannot accept ourselves.

Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults, a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism.

War is a brutal and fierce means of pacification; it means the suppression of resistance by the destruction or enslavement of the conquered.

To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.