Base souls have no faith in great individuals.
Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.
Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.
I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.
I only see clearly what I remember.
How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?
To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.
Supreme happiness consists in self-content.
Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them.
Conscience is the voice of the soul; the passions of the body.
Do to others as you would have others do to you, inspires all men with that other maxim of natural goodness a great deal less perfect, but perhaps more useful: Do good to yourself with as little prejudice as you can to others.
The visible order of the universe proclaims a supreme intelligence.
The man who gets the most out of life is not the one who has lived it longest, but the one who has felt life most deeply.
One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.
Those people who treat politics and morality separately will never understand either of them.
Great men never make bad use of their superiority. They see it and feel it and are not less modest. The more they have, the more they know their own deficiencies.
There is peace in dungeons, but is that enough to make dungeons desirable?
Everything made by man may be destroyed by man; there are no ineffaceable characters except those engraved by nature; and nature makes neither princes nor rich men nor great lords.
An intelligent being, is the active principle of all things. One must have renounced all common sense to doubt it, and it is a waste of time to try to prove such self evident truth.
Ah, that is a perfume in which I delight; when they roast coffee near my house, I hasten to open the door to take in all the aroma.