“O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.”
“Plant and your spouse plants with you weed and you weed alone.”
“Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.”
“No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.”
“We are born weak, we need strength helpless, we need aid foolish, we need reason. All that we lack at birth, all that we need when we come to man's estate, is the gift of education.”
“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.”
“Base souls have no faith in great individuals.”
“How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?”
“God made me and broke the mold.”
“People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.”
“Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.”
“The world of reality has its limits the world of imagination is boundless.”
“Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.”
“Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.”
“No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.”
“Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million.”
“Nature never deceives us it is we who deceive ourselves.”
“I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature and that man will be myself.”
“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”
“Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.”
“Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.”
“What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?”
“Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.”