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

The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.

Nothing in nature is by chance... Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.

Everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find.

The greatest secret of monarchic rule...is to keep men deceived and to cloak in the specious name of religion the fear by which they must be checked, so that they will fight for slavery as they would for salvation, and will think it not shameful, but a most honorable achievement, to give their life and blood that one man may have a ground for boasting.

He who seeks to regulate everything by law is more likely to arouse vices than to reform them. It is best to grant what cannot be abolished, even though it be in itself harmful. How many evils spring from luxury, envy, avarice, drunkenness and the like, yet these are tolerated because they cannot be prevented by legal enactments.

The more intelligible a thing is, the more easily it is retained in the memory, and counterwise, the less intelligible it is, the more easily we forget it.