Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.
In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.
When a man is in love, jealous, and just whipped by the Inquisition, he is no longer himself.
I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.
Fear follows crime and is its punishment.
Error flies from mouth to mouth, from pen to pen, and to destroy it takes ages.
Virtue debases itself in justifying itself.
Almost all life depends on probabilities.
Let us work without theorizing, tis the only way to make life endurable.
Men hate the individual whom they call avaricious only because nothing can be gained from him.
We cannot wish for that we know not.
What can we say with certainty?
We must cultivate our own garden. When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.
We cannot always oblige; but we can always speak obligingly.
There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.
I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?
There is a wide difference between speaking to deceive, and being silent to be impenetrable.
It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother’s womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.
There is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night.
Our character is composed of our ideas and our feelings: and, since it has been proved that we give ourselves neither feelings nor ideas, our character does not depend on us. If it did depend on us, there is nobody who would not be perfect. If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing.