[When anything happens, we interpret it as good or bad, but...] We do not know what is really good or bad fortune. [Only the future can decide. For example, what appears to be bad today may in fact lead us to a greater good tomorrow and by the very act of thinking and planning in that positive way, we can help make that good future come true.]

A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined.

I have suffered too much in this world not to hope for another.

With children use force; with men reason; such is the natural order of things. The wise man requires no law.

I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.

To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.

The abuse of books kills science. Believing that we know what we have read, we believe that we can dispense with learning it.