Open the book of universal history at what period we may, it is always the India trade which is the cause of internal industry and foreign negotiation.

Men prefer to believe that they are degenerated angels, rather than elevated apes.

A day will come when the European god of the nineteenth century will be classed with the gods of Olympus and the Nile.

As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem. As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity.

What a state of society is this in which freethinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin?

Our enlightened posterity will look back upon us who eat oxen and sheep, just as we look upon cannibals.

One fact must be familiar to all those who have any experience of human nature - a sincerely religious man is often an exceedingly bad man.

It is a sure criterion of the civilisation of ancient Egypt that the soldiers did not carry arms except on duty, and that the private citizens did not carry them at all.

If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed.

Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.

It may safely be asserted that the art of war will soon be reduced to a simple question of expenditure and credit, and that the largest purse will be the strongest arm.

If you really want to know me, I said, we'll have to start with the witches.

You should always know when you're shifting gears in life. You should leave your era it should never leave you.

Check disease in its approach.

You are an artist. The canvas is your life. Make something worth staring at.

Man Made 'God' in his own image. The eternal, the infinate, the unnameable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as 'my god' or 'our god'.

It is not accidental that all phenomena of human life are dominated by the search for daily bread - the oldest link connecting all living things, man included, with the surrounding nature.

The appearances of natural objects are in themselves meaningless; the essential thing is feeling - in itself and completely independent of the context in which it has been evoked.

Life's better when it's fun. Boy, that's deep, isn't it?

It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable.

You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.