It is a characteristic of old age to find the progress of time accelerated. The less one accomplishes in a given time, the shorter does the retrospect appear.

The price of apparent happiness and enjoyment is the neglect of the spontaneous active energies of the acting members.

The state should avoid all solicitude for the positive welfare of its citizens, and not proceed a step further than is necessary for their mutual security and their protection against foreign enemies. It should impose restrictions on freedom for no other purpose.

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or our unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.

If the mind loves solitude, it has thereby acquired a loftier character, and it becomes still more noble when the taste is indulged in.

If we reason that we want happiness for others, not for ourselves, then we ought justly to be suspected of failing to recognize human nature for what it is and of wishing to turn men into machines.

The most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical song existing in any known tongue ....perhaps the deepest and loftiest thing the world has to show.