Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair-all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote from them. What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things; wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe.

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grandand immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.

All high beauty has a moral element in it.

I unsettle all things.

The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind?

All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.