If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

He who regulates everything by laws, is more likely to arouse vices than reform them.

The greater emotion with which we conceive a loved object to be affected toward us, the greater will be our complacency.

Desire nothing for yourself, which you do not desire for others.

In the state of nature, wrong-doing is impossible; or, if anyone does wrong, it is to himself, not to another. For no one by the law of nature is bound to please another, unless he chooses, nor to hold anything to be good or evil, but what he himself, according to his own temperament, pronounces to be so; and, to speak generally, nothing is forbidden by the law of nature, except what is beyond everyone's power.

The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God.

Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak.