Quote collection
187 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I discuss with myself questions of politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to followany idea, wise or mad that may present itself. My ideas are my harlots."
"There is no good father who would want to resemble our Heavenly Father."
"In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice."
"We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates."
"In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go."
"There is only one virtue, justice; only one duty, to be happy; only one corollary, not to overvalue life and not to fear death."
"If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal."
"If there are one hundred thousand damned souls for one saved soul, the devil has always the advantage without having given up his son to death."
"I have not the hope of being immortal, because the desire of it has not given me that vanity."
"What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your own days."
"For me, my thoughts are my prostitutes."
"Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one's innocence with the loss of one's prejudices."
"When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them."
"You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, so all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals… What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to defer wise resolutions to the fiftieth or sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained."
"Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to."
"Only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small-minded."
"Fanaticism is just one step away from barbarism."
"Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism."
"Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey."
"Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things."