A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out |
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. |
A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on. |
A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents. |
A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species. |
A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing. |
Ambition and suspicion always go together. |
An hour-glass is a reminder not only of time's quick flight, but also of the dust to which we must at last return |
As I take up my pen I feel myself so full, so equal to my subject, and see my book so clearly before me in embryo, I would almost like to try to say it all in a single word. |
As nations improve, so do their gods |
Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit. |
Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age. |
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. |
First there is a time when we believe everything, then for a little while we believe with discrimination, then we believe nothing whatever, and then we believe everything again - and, moreover, give reasons why we believe. |
God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs. |