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 duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to our powers.

True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.

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

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism; reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion.

You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.

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.