Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect!

No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.

All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word.

Skepticism . . . is not intellectual only it is moral also, a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul.

What is philosophy but a continual battle against custom?

The devil has his elect.

Speech is silver, silence is golden.