Quote collection
979 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"My library is my kingdom, and here I try to make my rule absolute-shutting off this single nook from wife, daughter and society. Elsewhere I have only a verbal authority, and vague. Unhappy is the man, in my opinion, who has no spot at home where he can be at home to himself-to court himself and hide away."
"Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country."
"There is no greater enemy to those who would please than expectation."
"A foreign war is a lot milder than a civil war."
"When Socrates, after being relieved of his irons, felt the relish of the itching that their weight had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to consider the close alliance between pain and pleasure."
"We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body."
"The reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits."
"A good marriage (if any there be) refuses the conditions of love and endeavors to present those of amity."
"Fear sometimes adds wings to the heels, and sometimes nails them to the ground, and fetters them from moving."
"There is not one of us that would not be worse than kings, if so continually corrupted as they are with a sort of vermin called flatterers."
"To distract myself from tiresome thoughts, I have only to resort to books; they easily draw my mind to themselves and away from other things."
"I had rather complain of ill-fortune than be ashamed of victory."
"Behold the hands, how they promise, conjure, appeal, menace, pray, supplicate, refuse, beckon, interrogate, admire, confess, cringe, instruct, command, mock and what not besides, with a variation and multiplication of variation which makes the tongue envious."
"The most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles."
"It is far more probable that our senses should deceive us, than that an old woman should be carried up a chimney on a broom stick; and that it is far less astonishing that witnesses should lie, than that witches should perform the acts that were alleged."
"Words repeated again have as another sound, so another sense."
"The human face is a weak guarantee; yet it deserves some consideration. And if I had to whip the wicked, I would do so more severely to those who belied and betrayed the promises that nature had implanted on their brows; I would punish malice more harshly when it was hidden under a kindly appearance."
"We should spread joy, but, as far as we can, repress sorrow."
"As for extraordinary things, all the provision in the world would not suffice."
"Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm or a flea and yet will create Gods by the dozen!"