Nothing resembles pride so much as discouragement.

Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense, and is lending oneself to the universal illusion without becoming its dupe.

We are always making God our accomplice so that we may legalize our own inequities.

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.

Men of genius supply the substance of history, while the mass of men are but the critical filter, the limiting, slackening, passive force needed for the modification of ideas supplied by genius.

Men prefer the false due to habit, passion, will. Preference for truth is rare. Men are ruled by their fear of truth.

Happiness has no limits, because God has neither bottom nor bounds, and because happiness is nothing but the conquest of God through love.