You do well to have visions of a better life than of every day, but it is the life of every day from which the elements of a better life must come.

In any event, a truth that disheartens, because it is true, is still of far more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.

To have known how to change the past into a few saddened smiles-is this not to master the future?

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

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

The dog who meets with a good master is the happier of the two.

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.