It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.

If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.

Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.

We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals.

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.

The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.

Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.

A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.

The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.

To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.

That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me.

Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?

With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.

I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.

It is in the gift for employing all the vicissitudes of life to one's own advantage and to that of one's craft that a large part of genius consists.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.

We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.

To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.