How many kings are governed by their ministers, how many ministers by their secretaries? Who, in such cases, is really the chief?

Were not the eye made to receive the rays of the sun, it could not behold the sun; if the peculiar power of God lay not in us, how could the godlike charm us?

It is in the half fools and the half wise that the greatest danger lies.

Every man has enough power left to carry out that of which he is convinced.

What sort of God would it be, who only pushed from without.

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.

Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.