If brandy was made out of sparrows there would soon be no sparrows.
Do not take too artificial a view of mankind but judge them from a natural standpoint, deeming them neither over good nor over bad.
The fly that doesn't want to be swatted is most secure when it lights on the fly-swatter.
Cautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.
He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals.
A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.
There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.
The celebrated painter Gainsborough got as much pleasure from seeing violins as from hearing them.
Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me.
Perhaps pure reason without heart would never have thought of God.
To make astute people believe one is what one is not is, in most cases, harder than actually to become what one wishes to appear.
I have never yet met anyone who did not think it was an agreeable sensation to cut tinfoil with scissors.
If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.
The wisdom of providence is as much revealed in the rarity of genius, as in the circumstance that not everyone is deaf or blind.
So-called professional mathematicians have, in their reliance on the relative incapacity of the rest of mankind, acquired for themselves a reputation for profundity very similar to the reputation for sanctity possessed by theologians.
If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.
In mathematical analysis we call x the undetermined part of line a: the rest we don't call y, as we do in common life, but a-x. Hence mathematical language has great advantages over the common language.
Some theories are good for nothing except to be argued about.
With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.
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.
It is too bad if you have to do everything upon reflection and can't do anything from early habit.
He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.
Many intelligent people, when about to write . . . , force on their minds a certain notion about style, just as they screw up their faces when they sit for their portraits.
In each of us there is a little of all of us.
He marvelled at the fact that the cats had two holes cut in their fur at precisely the spot where their eyes were.
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