"With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet."

"The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle."

"The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority."

"The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism."

"Sickness is mankind's greatest defect."

"Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much."

"There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking."

"Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me."

"Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams."

"Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own."

"The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing."

"With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing."

"Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous."

"The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it."

"Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads."

"Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them."

"A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments."

"What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?"