My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because his argument is weak.

Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.

Invisible things are the only realities; invisible things alone are the things that shall remain.

Of Belief Human mathematics, so to speak, like the length of life, are subject to the doctrine of chances.

My mind was bursting with depression and anguish. I muttered imprecations and murmuring as I passed along. I was full of loathing and abhorrence of life, and all that life carries in its train.

If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.