It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

There are those who understand everything till one puts it into words

There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.

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

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

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

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

Every possible idea therefore may be said to be used existentially, for every possible idea qualifies and is true of a real world. And the number of real worlds, in a word, is indefinite. Every idea therefore in a sense is true, and is true of reality. The question with every idea is how far and in what sense is it true. The question is always whether, qualifying reality in one sense, the idea qualifies reality in another sense also. For, true in one world, an idea may be false in another world...