Combien de gens se font abstraits pour para?tre profonds! La plupart des termes abstraits sont des ombres qui cachent des vides. How many people become abstract in order to appear profound! Most abstract terms are shadows that conceal a void.
Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth.
A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.
Americans get very simple explanations of what happens to them.
The world have payed too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.
It is scarcely a mark of intellectual profundity to have noticed that our society is big.
But what can a man see of a library being one day in it?
Youth has a quickness of apprehension, which it is very apt to mistake for an acuteness of penetration.
What can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli.
An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.
Whether it was a song, a person, or a story, there was a lot you couldn’t know from just an excerpt, a glance, or part of a chorus.
Music-hall songs provide the dull with wit, just as proverbs provide them with wisdom.
An actor can spew out thoughts, but they're not all gold.
Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.
