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

There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate