One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind

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Before one blames, one should always find out whether one cannot excuse. To discover little faults has been always the particularity of such brains that are a little or not at all above the average. The superior ones keep quiet or say something against the whole and the great minds transform without blaming

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It is said that truth comes from the mouths of fools and children: I wish every good mind which feels an inclination for satire would reflect that the finest satirist always has something of both in him

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Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism

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If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever.... Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later

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There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them

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Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial

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I have remarked very clearly that I am often of one opinion when I am lying down and of another when I am standing up

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A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense

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Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself

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