Power should act and not talk.
Piety is not an end, but a means: a means of attaining the highest culture by the purest tranquillity of soul. Hence it may be observed that those who set up piety as an end and object are mostly hypocrites.
Perfection is the measure of heaven, and the wish to be perfect the measure of man.
Painting and tattooing of the body is a return to animalism.
Our passions are, in truth, like the phoenix. When the old one burns away, the new one rises out of its ashes at once.
Opponents fancy they refute us when they repeat their own opinion and pay no attention to ours.
Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.
Nothing is more highly to be prized than the value of each day.
Nothing is more frightful than imagination without taste.
Nature! We are surrounded by her and locked in her clasp: powerless to leave her, and powerless to come closer to her. Unasked and unwarned she takes us up into the whirl of her dance, and hurries on with us till we are weary and fall from her arms.
Man would not be the finest creature in the world if he were not too fine for it.
Love of truth shows itself in this, that a man knows how to find and value the good in everything.