He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.

Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest sign of strength of mind.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

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.

Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.

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

Prejudices are so to speak the mechanical instincts of men: through their prejudices they do without any effort many things they would find too difficult to think through to the point of resolving to do them.

Don't judge a man by his opinions, but what his opinions have made of him.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

It is a dangerous thing for the perfecting of our minds to gain applause by works that do not call forth the whole of our energies; for in that case one generally comes to a standstill.

Man is to be found in reason, God in the passions.

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

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

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

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