The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind..

It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himse….

We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings..

The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care..

The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge..

The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil..

Religion is rather the attempt to express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect of our being..

True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat..

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness..

My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a….

An aphorism is true where it has fixed the impression of a genuine experience..

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct..

The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once..

There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us..

Eclecticism. Every truth is so true that any truth must be false..

The one self- knowledge worth having is to know one's own mind..

His mind is so open - so open that ideas simply pass through it..

I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced..

Up to a certain point every man is what he thinks he is..

Reason teaches us that what is good is good for something, and that what is good for nothing is not good at all..

The cost of a thing is what I call life which has to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run..