Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

If the Ego is hateful, Love your neighbor as yourself becomes a cruel irony.

One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall.

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

History is the most dangerous product which the chemistry of the mind has concocted. Its properties are well known. It produces dreams and drunkenness. It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, torments them in their repose, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution. It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable and vainglorious.

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable to so much as conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best. Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo.