If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever.... Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later

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There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them

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Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial

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I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up

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A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense

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Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself

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The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect

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When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

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The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak

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What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed...

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