Knowledge of the world in only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.

It seems to me that physical sickness softens, just as moral sickness hardens, the heart.

Experience only can teach men not to prefer what strikes them for the present moment, to what will have much greater weight with the them hereafter.

When a man is once in fashion, all he does is right.

The late Président de Montesquieu told me that he knew how to be blind--he had been so for such a long time--but I swear that I do not know how to be deaf: I cannot get used to it, and I am as humiliated and distressed by it today as I was during the first week. No philosophy in the world can palliate deafness.

We are really so prejudiced by our educations, that, as the ancients deified their heroes, we deify their madmen.

Inferiority is what you enjoy in your best friends.