All the mind's activity is easy if it is not subjected to reality.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

The thirst for something other than what we have…to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it.

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid, the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognized in a few years time.

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.

The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.