If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.
Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.
Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.
Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?
It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.
I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters.
Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.
Everything I eat has been proved by some doctor or other to be a deadly poison, and everything I don’t eat has been proved to be indispensable for life. But I go marching on.
We are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor without injuring or helping yourself.
All professions are conspiracies against the laity.
I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.