Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.
The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.
Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.
People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.
Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.