Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and sotheir house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.

If you want to be great and successful, choose people who are great and successful and walk side by side with them.

The State is our neighbors; our neighbors are the State.

A man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves.

I cannot go to the houses of my nearest relatives, because I do not wish to be alone. Society exists by chemical affinity, and not otherwise.

All great men come out of the middle classes.

Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyph to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life before he apprehends it as truth.