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.
Leave those vain moralists, my friend, and return to the depth of your soul: that is where you will always rediscover the source of the sacred fire which so often inflamed us with love of the sublime virtues; that is where you will see the eternal image of true beauty, the contemplation of which inspires us with a holy enthusiasm.
Taste is, so to speak, the microscope of the judgment.
My bad head cannot adjust itself to the way things are.... If I want to depict spring, it has to be in wintertime; if I want to describe a beautiful landscape, I must be enclosed within walls; and I have said a hundred times that if I were put in the Bastille, there I would paint a picture of liberty.
We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.
At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.
He thinks like a philosopher, but governs like a king.
The abuse of books kills science. Believing that we know what we have read, we believe that we can dispense with learning it.
Men, in general, are not this or that, they are what they are made to be.
Supreme happiness consists in self-content; that we may gain this self-content, we are placed upon this earth and endowed with freedom.
What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, and charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, civil as well as political.
A citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them.
I may not be better than other people, but at least I'm different.
Gracefulness cannot subsist without ease; delicacy is not debility; nor must a woman be sick in order to please. Infirmity, and sickness may excite our pity, but desire and pleasure require the bloom and vigor of health.
I may not amount to much, but at least I am unique.
Remorse sleeps during a prosperous period but wakes up in adversity.
For it is in our nature to endure patiently the decrees of fate, but not the ill-will of others.
Men speak from knowledge, women from imagination.
Every blue-stocking will remain a spinster as long as there are sensible men on the earth. [Fr., Toute fille lettree restera fille toute sa vie, quand il n'y aura que des hommes senses sur la terre.]
The writings of women are always cold and pretty like themselves. There is as much wit as you may desire, but never any soul.
Whoever blushes confesses guilt, true innocence never feels shame.
Or, rather, let us be more simple and less vain.
To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.
Love, known to the person by whom it is inspired, becomes more bearable.
There is no folly of which a man who is not a fool cannot get rid except vanity; of this nothing cures a man except experience of its bad consequences, if indeed anything can cure it.
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