Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was - nobody any longer wanted to be that.

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.