How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.

The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.

Good breeding is the result of good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others.

Understand this law and you will then know, beyond room for the slightest doubt, that you are constantly punishing yourself for every wrong you commit and rewarding yourself for every act of constructive conduct in which you indulge.

Our thoughts take the wildest flight: Even at the moment when they should arrange themselves in thoughtful order.

Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.

Genius always gives its best at first; prudence, at last.

A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.

No crime is so great as daring to excel.

Revenge is the act of passion, vengeance is an act of justice.