Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.
It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in many things more restraint and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason.
There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.
I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind – and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.
If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.
One may be humble out of pride.
There is no passion so contagious as that of fear.
Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.
Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance.
The world is but a perpetual see-saw.
There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.
Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly.
I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it.
In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk – they are all part of the curriculum.
Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.
How often our involuntary facial motions testify to the thoughts we were keeping secret, and betray us to those around!
What harm cause not those huge draughts or pictures which wanton youth with chalk or coals draw in each passage, wall or stairs of our great houses, whence a cruel contempt of our natural store is bred in them?
There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves.
Men are tormented by the opinions they have of things, and not the things themselves.
Knowledge is an excellent drug; but no drug has virtue enough to preserve itself from corruption and decay, if the vessel be tainted and impure wherein it is put to keep.