 We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already. |
| A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents. |
| 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. |
| The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted. |
| With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed. |
| Sickness is mankind's greatest defect. |
| Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older. |
| One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them. |
| He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery. |
| There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking. |
| Men still have to be governed by deception. |
| We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy at least until we have become as clever as they are. |
| Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer. |
| There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven. |
| Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together. |
| He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals. |
| I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested. |
| That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim. |
| A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. |
| We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest. |
