There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

Destroy it. There may be a redistribution of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as the old.

The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.

Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.

In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.

Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.