Only greatly insolent people establish a religious law which is to be taken for granted by others, which should be accepted by everyone on faith, without any discussion or doubts. Why must people do this?

Every reform by violence is to be deprecated, because it does little to correct the evil while men remain as they are, and because wisdom has no need of violence.

There are no conditions to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.

I often think how unfairly life's good fortune is sometimes distributed.

Regard the society of women as a necessary unpleasantness of social life, and avoid it as much as possible.

Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.