I say it is impossible that so sensible a people [citizens of Paris], under such circumstances, should have lived so long by the smoky, unwholesome, and enormously expensive light of candles, if they had really known that they might have had as much pure light of the sun for nothing.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

The riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labor its inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the quantity of silver and gold they possess; which will purchase more or less labor, and therefore is more or less valuable, as is said before, according to its scarcity or plenty.

You cannot always run from a weakness. You must sometime fight it out or perish.

If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.

A spoonful of honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar.

If you do tomorrow what you did today , you will get tomorrow what you got today