A library may be very large; but if it is in disorder, it is not so useful as one that is small but well arranged. In the same way, a man may have a great mass of knowledge, but if he has not worked it up by thinking it over for himself, it has much less value than a far smaller amount which he has thoroughly pondered.
Traim intr-o societate de porci spinosi surprinsa de iarna raului universal; vrem sa ne incalzim unii de altii, dar tepii de pe spatele fiecaruia nu ne lasa.
Courage, however, may also be explained as a readiness to meet ills that threaten at the moment, in order to avoid greater ills that lie in the future; whereas cowardice does the contrary.
There is an underlying unity in all things.
El dolor no brota de no tener. Brota de querer tener y sin embargo no tener. El querer tener es la conditio sine qua non para que el dolor sea eficaz.
The only freedom that exists is of a metaphysical character. In the physical world freedom is an impossibility.
Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to the dramatic art; for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible. Thus it is that all journalists are, in the very nature of their calling, alarmists; and this is their way of giving interest to what they write. Herein.
On account of its originality, excellence in every field strikes us as so new and so strange, that to recognize it at first glance will require not only understanding, but also education in the same discipline. As a rule, excellence achieves late recognition, all the later as the discipline is loftier, and those who truly enlighten humankind share the fate of the fixed stars, the light from which requires many years before it descends to the horizon.
For if the choice were given to any individual between his own destruction and that of the world, I do not need to say where it would land in the great majority.
Therefore books do not take the place of experience, because concepts always remain universal, and so do not reach down to the particular; yet it is precisely the particular that has to be dealt with in life.
Thus, flowers cannot be preserved, but their ethereal oil, their essence, with the same smell and the same virtues, can. The conduct that has had correct concepts for its guidance will, in the result, coincide with the reality intended.
She has tender feet, for she walks not on the hard earth, but treads on the heads of men.
Every State looks upon its neighbours as at bottom a horde of robbers, who will fall upon it as soon as they have the opportunity.
The characteristic mark of minds of the first rank is the immediacy of all their judgements. Everything they produce is the result of thinking for themselves and already in the way it is spoken everywhere announces itself as such.
It is very necessary that a man should be apprised early in life that it is a masquerade in which he finds himself.
You need only look at the way in which she is formed, to see that woman is not meant to undergo great labor, whether of the mind or of the body. She pays the debt of life not by what she does, but by what she suffers; by the pains of child-bearing and care for the child, and by submission to her husband, to whom she should be a patient and cheering companion.
In accordance with such zeal, by reducing the external world to a matter of faith, he wanted merely to open a little door for faith in general, and to prepare the credit for that which was afterwards actually to be offered on credit; just as if, to introduce paper money, we tried to appeal to the fact that the value of the ringing coin depended merely on the stamp the State put on it.
No animal ever torments another for the mere purpose of tormenting, but man does it, and it is this that constitutes the diabolical feature in his character which is so much worse than the merely animal.
It is just as little necessary for the saint to be a philosopher as for the philosopher to be a saint; just as it is not necessary for a perfectly beautiful person to be a great sculptor, or for a sculptor to be himself a beautiful person. In general it is a strange demand on a moralist that he should commend no other virtue than that which he himself possesses.
To talk of rational beings apart from man is as if we attempted to talk of heavy beings apart from bodies.