The love of study is in us the only lasting passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruins.

I have ever held it as a maxim never to do that through another which it was impossible for me to execute myself

What cowardice it is to be dismayed by the happiness of others and devastated by there good fortune.

One more organ or one less in our body would give us a different intelligence. In fact, all the established laws as to why our body is a certain way would be different if our body were not that way.

Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist.

Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.

Man is a social animal formed to please in society.