Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.

I was not at all worried about finding my doctor boring; I expected from him, thanks to an art of which the laws escaped me, that he pronounce concerning my health an indisputable oracle by consulting my entrails.

A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price.

None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.