God only pours out his light into the mind after having subdued the rebellion of the will by an altogether heavenly gentleness which charms and wins it.
Nature, which alone is good, is wholly familiar and common.
No one is ignorant that there are two avenues by which opinions are received into the soul, which are its two principal powers: the understanding and the will.
All the miseries of mankind come from one thing, not knowing how to remain alone.
How comes it that a cripple does not offend us, but a fool does? Because a cripple recognizes that we walk straight, whereas a fool declares that it is we who are silly; if it were not so, we should feel pity and not anger.
We are never in search of things, but always in search of the search.
Eloquence; it requires the pleasant and the real; but the pleasant must itself be drawn from the true.
Man lives between the infinitely large and the infinitely small.
All our reasoning boils down to yielding to sentiment.
An advocate who has been well paid in advance will find the cause he is pleading all the more just.
Anyone who found the secret of rejoicing when things go well without being annoyed when they go badly would have found the point.
Bless yourself with holy water, have Masses said, and so on; by a simple and natural process this will make you believe, and will dull you – will quiet your proudly critical intellect.
Caesar was too old, it seems to me, to go off and amuse himself conquering the world. Such a pastime was all right for Augustus and Alexander; they were young men, not easily held in check, but Caesar ought to have been more mature.
One of the greatest artifices the devil uses to engage men in vice and debauchery, is to fasten names of contempt on certain virtues, and thus fill weak souls with a foolish fear of passing for scrupulous, should they desire to put them in practice.
Mutual cheating is the foundation of society.
The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice.
It is an appalling thing to feel all one possesses drain away.
Curiosity is nothing more than vanity. More often than not we only seek knowledge to show it off.
We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.
The world is ruled by force, not by opinion; but opinion uses force.