We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.
Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.
Any person of honor chooses rather to lose his honor than to lose his conscience.
The thing I fear most is fear.
Let us not be ashamed to speak what we shame not to think.
It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.
Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of soul, impossible.
Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.
It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in many things more restraint and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason.
There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.
I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind – and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.
If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.
One may be humble out of pride.
There is no passion so contagious as that of fear.
Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.
Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.
The world is but a perpetual see-saw.
There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.
Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly.
I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it.