Happiness will never be any greater than the idea we have of it.

If you love yourself meanly, childishly, timidly, even so shall you love your neighbor.

To be good we must needs have suffered; but perhaps it is necessary to have caused suffering before we can become better.

We can never judge a soul above the high water mark of our own.

If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.

At every crossway on the path that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us have no fear that the fair towers of former days be sufficiently defended. The least that the most timid among us can do is not to add to the immense dead weight that nature drags along.

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.