“They prefer death to peace, others prefer death to war. Any opinion can be preferred to life, which it seems so natural to love dearly.”

“I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.”

“The more I see of Mankind, the more I prefer my dog.”

“Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.”

“Each man is everything to himself, for with his death everything is dead for him. That is why each of us thinks he is everything to everyone. We must not judge nature by ourselves, but by its own standards.”

“The world is a good judge of things, for it is in natural ignorance, which is man's true state. The sciences have two extremes which meet. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great intellects, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same ignorance from which they set out; but this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself. Those between the two, who have departed from natural ignorance and not been able to reach the other, have some smattering of this vain knowledge and pretend to be wise. These trouble the world and are bad judges of everything. The people and the wise constitute the world; these despise it, and are despised. They judge badly of everything, and the world judges rightly of them.”

“Nature constantly begins the same things over again, years, days, hours, spaces too. And numbers run end to end, one after another. This makes something in a way infinite and eternal. It is not that any of this is really infinite and eternal, but these finite entities multiply infinitely. Thus only number, which multiplies them, seems to me to be infinite.”