We love old travelers: we love to hear them prate, drivel and lie; we love them for their asinine vanity, their ability to bore, their luxuriant fertility of imagination, their startling, brilliant, overwhelming mendacity.

Ignorance is not, not knowing something. It is knowing what isn't so.

It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.

Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass.

I would much prefer to suffer from the clean incision of an honest lancet than from a sweetened poison.

There are no grades of vanity; there are only grades of ability in concealing it.

The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it.