Dissimulation, even the most innocent in its nature, is ever productive of embarrassment; whether the design is evil or not artifice is always dangerous and almost inevitably disgraceful.

The mind, like all other things, will become impaired, the sciences are its food,--they nourish, but at the same time they consume it.

Life is a kind of sleep: old men sleep longest, nor begin to wake but when they are to die.

Party loyalty lowers the greatest men to the petty level of the masses.

There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!

To be among people one loves, that's sufficient; to dream, to speak to them, to be silent among them, to think of indifferent things; but among them, everything is equal.

No road is to long for him who advances slowly and does not hurry and no attainment is beyond his reach who equips himself with patience to achieve it