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

An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.

The dog is the only living being that has found and recognizes an indubitable, tangible and definite god. He knows to whom above him to give himself. He has not to seek for a superior and infinite power.

Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?.

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.

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.

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