He who is in love with himself has at least this advantage - he won't encounter many rivals.
We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.
I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.
There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.
Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.
Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.
One should never trust a person who, while assuring you of something, puts his hands on his heart.
The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.
The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.
A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.
Sickness is mankind's greatest defect.
Universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones.
When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?
How happy would many people live if they cared about other people's affairs as little as about their own.
An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.
Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.
A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents.
What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
The preaching in the churches does not make the lightning rods on them unnecessary.
Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.
Theologians always try to turn the Bible into a book without common sense.
It is a question whether, when we break a murderer on the wheel, we do not fall into the error a child makes when it hits the chair it has bumped into.
The grave is still the best shelter against the storms of destiny.
Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?
If people should ever start to do only what is necessary millions would die of hunger.
A book is a mirror: If an ape peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.