In meeting again after a separation, acquaintances ask after our outward life, friends after our inner life.
Not reading a beautiful book again because you’ve already read it, that is, as if you were not visiting a dear friend again because you know him already.
Oh happy pessimists! What a joy it is to them to be able to prove again and again that there is no joy.
Little evil would be done in the world if evil never could be done in the name of good.
How wise must one be to be always kind.
He who has trusted where he ought not will surely mistrust where he ought not.
The sympathy of most people consists of a mixture of good-humour, curiosity, and self-importance.
Even a stopped clock is right twice every day. After some years, it can boast of a long series of successes.
What you wish to do you are apt to think you ought to do.
The understanding of some men is clear, that of others brilliant. The former illumines its surroundings; the latter obscures them.
Nothing makes us more cowardly and unconscionable than the desire to be loved by everyone.
Nothing is less promising than precocity. A young thistle is more like a future tree than is a young oak.
Between being able to and actually doing something lies an ocean, and on its bottom rests all too often the wreck of willpower.
Many a truth is the result of an error.
You can sink so fast that you think you are flying.
However much you paid for a beautiful illusion, you got a bargain.
Deep learning doesn’t shine.
There are women who love their husbands as blindly, as enthusiastically, and as enigmatically as nuns their cloister.
An opinion may be controverted; a prejudice, never.
An aphorism is the last link in a long chain of thought.