Each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity.

The craving for a delicate fruit is pleasanter than the fruit itself.

What destiny sends, bear! Whoever perseveres will be crowned.

Have you never observed that children will sometimes, of a sudden, give utterance to ideas which makes us wonder how they got possession of them? Which presuppose a long series of other ideas and secret self-communings? Which break forth like a full stream out of the earth, an infallible sign that the stream was not produced in a moment from a few raindrops, but had long been flowing concealed beneath the ground?

Man is a central creature between the animals, that is to say, the most perfect form, which unites the traits of all in the most complete epitome.

Touch not the flute when drums are sounding around; when fools have the word, the wise will be silent.

The savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species