For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.

...Hard people are weak people whom nobody wants, and the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that meekness which the common herd mistake for weakness.

It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates.

Everything that seems imperishable tends to extinguishment.

The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.