I have been taken by Satan into the highest mountain in the earth, and when there he said he to me, ‘Child of earth, what wouldst thou have to make thee adore me?’ I replied, ‘Listen, I wish to be Providence myself, for I feel that the most beautiful, noblest, most sublime thing in the world, is to recompense and punish.

To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.

Misfortune does not help us to believe.

Everyone knows that drunkards and lovers have a protecting diety.

I know what happiness and what despair are, and I never make a jest of such feelings. Take it, then, but in exchange —

Every individual, from the highest to the lowest degree, has his place in the ladder of social life, and around him swirls a little world of interests, composed of stormy passions and conflicting atoms

Happiness is egotistical.