The body always ends by being a bore. Nothing remains beautiful and interesting except thought, because the thought is the life.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results.

No man is good enough to be another man’s master.

It is easy—terribly easy—to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work.

There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.

Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half-truths that are dangerous.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

All progress means war with Society.