Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools.

For to accuse requires less eloquence, such is man's nature, than to excuse; and condemnation, than absolution, more resembles justice.

A great leap in the dark

Now I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark

When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death.

... it is one thing to desire, another to be in capacity fit for what we desire.

For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it.

It's not the pace of life I mind. It's the sudden stop at the end.

If men are naturally in a state of war, why do they always carry arms and why do they have keys to lock their doors?

A man's conscience and his judgment are the same thing, and, as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous

What is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body?

Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.

God put me on this Earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I'm so far behind that I'll never die".

The source of every crime, is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions.

War consisteth not in battle only,or the act of fighting;but in a tract of time,wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known

Give an inch, he'll take an ell.

As a draft-animal is yoked in a wagon, even so the spirit is yoked in this body

It is many times with a fraudulent Design that men stick their corrupt Doctrine with the Cloves of other mens Wit.

Nor can a man any more live, whose Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand.

In the very shadows of doubt a thread of reason (so to speak) begins, by whose guidance we shall escape to the clearest light.

It is in the laws of a commonwealth, as in the laws of gaming: Whatsoever the gamesters all agree on, is injustice to none of them.

Fact be virtuous, or vicious, as Fortune pleaseth

Look not at the greatness of the evil past, but the greatness of the good to follow.

I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdity of my waking thoughts.

He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himselfe, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind;

Liberty, to define it, is nothing other than the absence of impediments to motion

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes.

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.

I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me...I don't know which makes me feel worse.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.