Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.
The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.
Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.
It is too difficult to think nobly when one thinks only of earning a living.
Accent is the soul of language; it gives to it both feeling and truth.
We do not know what really good or bad fortune is.
The empire of woman is an empire of softness, of address, of complacency. Her commands are caresses, her menaces are tears.
We cannot teach children the danger of telling lies to men without realising, on the man’s part, the danger of telling lies to children. A single untruth on the part of the master will destroy the results of his education.
We should not teach children the sciences; but give them a taste for them.
We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.
Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.
God made me and broke the mold.
I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.
You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.
Living is not breathing but doing.
Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.
Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.
I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature...
You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again.
When a man dies he clutches in his hands only that which he has given away during his lifetime.