Give, but, if possible, spare the poor man the shame of begging.
Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.
Passions destroy more prejudices than philosophy does.
Whatever dressing one gives to mushrooms, to whatever sauces our Apiciuses put them, they are not really good but to be sent back to the dungheap where they are born.
If there are one hundred thousand damned souls for one saved soul, the devil has always the advantage without having given up his son to death.
I have not the hope of being immortal, because the desire of it has not given me that vanity.
He whom we call a gentleman is no longer the man of Nature.
There is only one virtue, justice; only one duty, to be happy; only one corollary, not to overvalue life and not to fear death.
How easy it is to tell tales!
Shakespeare’s fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.
All children are essentially criminal.
The man who first pronounced the barbarous word God ought to have been immediately destroyed.
The Christian religion teaches us to imitate a God that is cruel, insidious, jealous, and implacable in his wrath.
You can be sure that a painter reveals himself in his work as much as and more than a writer does in his.
If reason be a gift of Heaven, and we can say as much of faith, Heaven has certainly made us two gifts not only incompatible, but in direct contradiction to each other. In order to solve the difficulty, we are compelled to say either that faith is a chimera or that reason is useless.
It is raining bombs on the house of the Lord. I go in fear and trembling lest one of these terrible bombers gets into difficulties.
The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual.
Integrity is the evidence of all civil virtues.
To describe women, the pen should be dipped in the humid colors of the rainbow, and the paper dried with the dust gathered from the wings of a butterfly.
The enjoyment of freedom which could be exercised without any motivation would be the real hallmark of a maniac.