Every man has his dignity. I’m willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.
Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.
Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: ‘My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.’ This stranger is a theologian.
The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.
The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dice box in hand, shaking the dice.
Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.
When we know to read our own hearts, we acquire wisdom of the heartsof others.
The bad gives rise to the good, the good inspires the better, the better produces the excellent, the excellent is followed by the bizarre.
The best mannered people make the most absurd lovers.
En ge ne ral, plus un peuple est civilise, poli, moins ses moeurs sont poe tiques; tout s’affaiblit en s’adoucissant. Ingeneral, themore civilized and refinedthepeople, the less poetic are its morals; everything weakens as it mellows.
Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high.
Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.
To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.
Distance is a great promoter of admiration.
The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.
Only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small- minded.
If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant’s reasoning to the grown man’s passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.
If you disturb the colors of the rainbow, the rainbow is no longer beautiful.
In general, children, like men, and men, like children, prefer entertainment to education.
Those who fear the facts will forever try to discredit the fact-finders.