Now that we have learned to fly the air like birds, swim under water like fish, we lack one thing – to learn to live on earth as human beings.
A serious illness or a death advertises the doctor exactly as a hanging advertises the barrister who defended the person hanged.
Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.
Social progress takes effect through the replacement of all institutions by new ones; and since every institution involves the recognition of the duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every step.
All roads end at the grave, which is the gate to nothingness.
I really don’t think I could consent to go to Heaven if I thought there were no animals there.
When your eyes are fixed in the stare of unconsciousness, and your throat coughs the last gasping breath – as one dragged in the dark to a great precipice – what assistance are a wife and child?
It is monstrous that custom should force us to display our faces ostentatiously, however worn and wrinkled and mean they may be, whilst carefully concealing all our other parts, however shapely and well preserved.
We all go about longing for love: it is the first need of our natures, the loudest cry of our hearts.
I like to quote myself frequently and often, it makes me sound much more intelligent than I actually am.
I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul.
It seems as though every time you learn something new you have to give up something.
I never accepted a knighthood because to me, is honour enough?
The righteous man takes his life in his hand whenever he utters the truth.
The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery.
We are the living graves of murdered beasts.
If you cannot attain knowledge without torturing a dog, you must do without knowledge.
Some persons, by hating vice too much, come to love men too little. Hatred is self-punishment. Hatred is the cowards revenge for being intimidated.
Only fools repeat the same things over and over, expecting to obtain different results.
The minorities are sometimes right. The majorities never.