“I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up...”
“Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.”
“The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.”
“Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.”
“A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.”
“If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.”
“Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.”
“Most subjects at universities are taught for no other purpose than that they may be re-taught when the students become teachers.”
“What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.”
“I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.”
“It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.”
“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.”
“Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.”
“With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.”
“To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.”
“The great rule: If the little bit you have is nothing special in itself, at least find a way of saying it that is a little bit special.”
“Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure.”
“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.”
“We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.”
“The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.”
“There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectible and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.”
“Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoiter the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.”
“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.”
“Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”