I have known men who have been sold and bought a hundred times, who have only got very fat and very comfortable in the process of exchange.

The heart of silver falls ever into the hands of brass. The sensitive herb is eaten as grass by the swine.

Dissimulation is the only thing that makes society possible; without its amenities the world would be a bear-garden.

The joy of a strong nature is as cloudless as its suffering is desolate.

The radical defect in Christianity is that it tried to win the world by a bribe, and it has become a nullity.

Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.

Love, the one supreme, unceasing source of human felicity, the one sole joy which lifts the whole mortal existence into the empyrean, was by it [Christianity] degraded into the mere mechanical action of reproduction.