Men who are orthodox when they are young are in danger of being middle-aged all their lives.

The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

The self-evident truth which makes men invincible is that inalienably they are inviolable persons.

When all men think alike, no one thinks very much.

To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.

In places where men are used to differences they inevitably become tolerant.

Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.