I detest war; it ruins conversation

We must always skim over pleasures. They are like marshy lands that we must travel nimbly, hardly daring to put down our feet.

I hate war, for it spoils conversation.

Mathematicians are like lovers. Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this consequence another.

It is the passions that do and undo everything.

People almost always do great things without knowing how to do them, and are quite surprised to have done them.

They will have the World to be in Large, what a Watch is in Small; which is very regular, and depends only upon the just disposing of the several Parts of the Movement.