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

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

Nothing can contribute more to peace of soul than the lack of any opinion whatever.

Ideas too are a life and a world.

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be re-taught when the students become teachers.

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.

Man loves company, even if it is only that of a smoldering candle.

If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.

One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.