Who has not the spirit of his age, Of his age has — Voltaire

We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one. It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue. ‘The Leningrad Notebooks’ (c .1735–50) in T. Besterman (ed.) Voltaire’s Notebook (2nd ed., 1968) vol. 2, p. 455 When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion. It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

Honor has not to be won; it must only not be lost. Arthur Schopenhauer If you look for the bad in people expecting to find it, you surely will. Abraham Lincoln Wisdom is the daughter of experience. Leonardo da Vinci The cruellest lies are often told in silence. Virginibus Puerisque (1881) title essay, pt. 4 Robert Louis Stevenson