To love to read is to exchange hours of ennui for hours of delight.

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.

It is always the adventurous who accomplish great things.

Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one's wit at the expense of one's better nature.

The Christian religion is a stranger to mere despotic power. The mildness so frequently recommended in the Gospel is incompatible with the despotic rage.

Democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to an aristocracy, or to the government of a single individual; and the spirit of extreme equality, which conducts it to despotism, as the despotism of a single individual finishes by conquest.

Men should be bewailed at their birth, and not at their death.