The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.

The value of ourselves is but the value of our melancholy and our disquiet.

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than animals that know nothing.

I have done what I could do in life, and if I could not do better, I did not deserve it. In vain I have tried to step beyond what bound me.

Physical suffering apart, not a single sorrow exists that can touch us except through our thoughts.

It is only in the space that our thoughts and our feelings enclose that our happiness can breathe in freedom.

At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past.