Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage.

We only really know what is new, what suddenly introduces to our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, that for which habit has not yet substituted its pale fac-similes.

No man is a complete mystery except to himself.

Wars are fought for the benefit of oligarchs, triumphs bought with the blood of peons.

For neither our greatest fears nor our greatest hopes are beyond the limits of our strength--we are able in the end both to dominate the first and to achieve the second.

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.