A good part of the fame of most celebrated men is due to the shortsightedness of their admirers

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

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.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.

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.

To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

He who understands the wise is wise already.

You can't comfort the afflicted without afflicting the comfortable.

Sin is all wrong doing.

Deciding taste is egotistical, but that's how taste is established, by somebody having the courage to say, 'I don't want to sell that.'

Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

Some actresses are just insane. I've never worked with a nasty actress - they're all absolutely delightful. But completely barking.

As smart technologies become more intrusive, they risk undermining our autonomy by suppressing behaviors that someone somewhere has deemed undesirable.

There is nothing like success to breed followers.

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like 'knight.'

Ethical and cultural desegregation. It is a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-association.