An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought.

Knowledge is boundless,--human capacity, limited.

It is commonly supposed that the art of pleasing is a wonderful aid in the pursuit of fortune; but the art of being bored is infinitely more successful.

All that I've learned, I've forgotten. The little that I still know, I've guessed.

One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be idiocy because it has been able to appeal to the majority

Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.

An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.