I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.
If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.
He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.
Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.
Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.
Divorce is probably of nearly the same date as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks the more ancient.
Answer me, you who believe that animals are only machines. Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?
To hold a pen is to be at war.
Our country is that spot to which our heart is bound.
This poem will never reach its destination. On Rousseau’s Ode To Posterity.
Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.
History is the study of the world’s crime.
Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.
Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.
What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.
If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
Minds differ still more than faces.