A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains.

History is nothing but a problem of mechanics applied to psychology.

I've met many thinkers and many cats, but the wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.

The search for causes must come after the collection of facts.

In the stormy current of life characters are weights or floats which at one time make us glide along the bottom, and at another maintain us on the surface.

There are as many kinds of modesty as there are races. To the English woman it is a duty; to the French woman a propriety.

Amid this vast and overwhelming space and in these boundless solar archipelagoes, how small is our own sphere, and the earth, what a grain of sand!