Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
Habit is stronger than reason.
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
Depression is rage spread thin.
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
Music is essentially useless, as is life.
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.
