Man believes himself always greater than he is, and is esteemed less than he is worth.
No wonder we are all more or less pleased with mediocrity, since it leaves us at rest, and gives the same comfortable feeling as when one associates with his equals.
The miller imagines that the corn grows only to make his mill turn.
Man cannot persist long in a conscious state, he must throw himself back into the unconscious, for his root lives there.
Alas, that we should be so unwilling to listen to the still and holy yearnings of the heart! A god whispers quite softly in our breast, softly yet audibly; telling us what we ought to seek and what to shun.
Reasonable men are the best dictionaries of conversation.
Every individual who is not creative has a negative, narrow, exclusive taste and succeeds in depriving creative being of its energy and life.
It matters little whether a man be mathematically or philologically or artistically cultivated, so he be but cultivated.
I reverence the individual who understands distinctly what he wishes; who unweariedly advances, who knows the means conducive to his object, and can seize and use them.
Whatever we think out, whatever we take in hand to do, should be perfectly and finally finished, that the world, if it must alter, will only have to spoil it; we have then nothing to do but unite the severed, to recollect and restore the dismembered.
All sects seem to me to be right in what they assert, and wrong in what they deny.
It is natural to man to regard himself as the object of the creation, and to think of all things in relation to himself, and the degree in which they can serve and be useful to him.
He who only tastes his error will long dwell with it, will take delight in it as in a singular felicity; while he who drains it to the dregs will, if he be not crazy, find it to be what it is.
How happy he who can still hope to lift himself from this sea of error! What we know not, that we are anxious to possess, and cannot use what we know.
Faith is a homely, private capital; as there are public savings-banks and poor funds, out of which in times of want we can relieve the necessities of individuals, so here the faithful take their coin in peace.
Woe to falsehood! it affords no relief to the breast, like truth; it gives us no comfort, pains him who forges it, and like an arrow directed by a god flies back and wounds the archer.
Nothing is so atrocious as fancy without taste.
Moral epochs have their course as well as the seasons. We can no more hold them fast than we can hold sun, moon, and stars. Our faults perpetually return upon us; and herein lies the subtlest difficulty of self-knowledge.
What sort of faults may we retain, nay, even cherish in ourselves? Those faults which are rather pleasant than offensive to others.
Change amuses the mind, but rarely profits.