The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.

The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.

All disgrace smells alike. Differences in ruin are only matters of degree.

It is not possible that a just God should forgive people who are wicked because another person who was good endured agony by being nailed to a cross.

We think in youth that our bodies are identical to ourselves and have the same interests, but discover later in life that they are heartless companions who have been accidentally yoked with us, and who are as likely as not, in our extreme sickness or old age, to treat us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of the worst bandits.

It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.

[The satirist] must fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.