When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.
Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they're worn out and times - and this is the worst of all - before we have new ones.
What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out.
Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.
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.
The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
To be content with life or to live merrily, rather all that is required is that we bestow on all things only a fleeting, superficial glance; the more thoughtful we become the more earnest we grow.
It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.
If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.
Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
To err is human also in so far as animals seldom or never err, or at least only the cleverest of them do so.
The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet.
Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.
That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.
Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.
Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.
