Now the answer ... is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.

The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.

A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.

It must be that to govern a nation you need a specific talent and that this may very well exist without general ability.

There are men whose sense of humour is so ill developed that they still bear a grudge against Copernicus because he dethroned them from the central position in the universe. They feel it a personal affront that they can no longer consider themselves the pivot upon which turns the whole of created things.

A soul is a troublesome possession, and when man developed it he lost the Garden of Eden.

There is no object to life. To nature nothing matters but the continuation of the species.