The one who acts is always without conscience; nobody has a conscience but the contemplative person.

A man is really alive only when he delights in the good-will of others.

Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers.

We don't get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like.

A state of affairs which leads to daily vexation is not the right state.

Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.

There is nothing by which men display their character so much as in what they consider ridiculous... Fools and sensible men are equally innocuous. It is in the half fools and the half wise that the great danger lies.