Everybody's friend is nobody's.

Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self-evident.

Each day is a little life; every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

The first forty years of life furnish the text, the remaining thirty the commentary.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also find the time to read them; but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every remeeting a foretaste of the resurrection. That is why even people who are indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they meet again after twenty or thirty years of separation.

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be liked by other people.

Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within.

There is one respect in which brutes show real wisdom when compared with us-I mean their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.

Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.