Sleeping is the height of genius

With the daguerreotype, everyone will be able to have their portrait taken . . . and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same.

Affliction is able to drown out every earthly voice. . . but the voice of eternity within a person it cannot drown.

I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night.

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.