Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.

The mind is found most acute and most uneasy in the morning. Uneasiness is, indeed, a species of sagacity - a passive sagacity. Fools are never uneasy.

It seems to never occur to fools that merit and good fortune are closely united.

People are always talking about originality, but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us, and this goes on to the end.

Woe to him who would ascribe something like reason to Chance, and make a religion of surrendering to it.

In the colored reflection we have Life.

We are pantheists as natural scientists, polytheists as poets, and monotheists as moral beings.