There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.

Marriage can be compared to a cage: birds outside it despair to enter, and birds within, to escape.

It makes me hate accepting things that are probable when they are held up before me as infallibly true. I prefer these words which tone down and modify the hastiness of our propositions: "Perhaps, In some sort, Some, They say, I think," and the like.

This notion [skepticism] is more clearly understood by asking "What do I know?"

Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light; for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.

The bitterness of the potion, and the abhorrence of the patient are necessary circumstances to the operation. It must be something to trouble and disturb the stomach that must purge and cure it.

There is no passion so contagious as that of fear.