As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word.

There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face.

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar -- that I call an achievement.

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

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.

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

Some theories are good for nothing except to be argued about.

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

He who says he hates every kind of flattery, and says it in earnest, certainly does not yet know every kind of flattery.