The majority of men... are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and... are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.

It is only at the first encounter that a face makes its full impression on us.

A writer should never be brief at the expense of being clear.

The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

To conceal a want of real ideas, many make for themselves an imposing apparatus of long compound words, intricate flourishes and phrases, new and unheard-of expressions, all of which together furnish an extremely difficult jargon that sounds very learned. Yet with all this they say-precisely nothing.

Nothing in life gives a man so much courage as the attainment or renewal of the conviction that other people regard him with favor; because it means that everyone joins to give him help and protection, which is an infinitely stronger bulwark against the ills of life than anything he can do himself.