Society and the World

What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.

Generosity lies less in giving much than in giving at the right moment.

Gardening is civil and social, but it wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw.

That’s what I consider true generosity. You give your all and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.

There’s no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool.

A learned fool is a greater fool than an ignorant fool.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.

Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt, and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.

Fanatics fear liberty more than they fear persecution.

One defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one’s intelligence.

The family is the association established by nature for the supply of man’s everyday wants.

There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.

A man’s life is interesting primarily when he has failed—I well know. For it’s a sign that he tried to surpass himself.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.

With Pleasure own your Errors past, And make each day a Critic on the last.

The most powerful cause of error is the war existing between the senses and reason.