The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim.

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.

An advocate who has been well paid in advance will find the cause he is pleading all the more just.

Civil wars are the greatest of evils. They are inevitable, if we wish to reward merit, for all will say that they are meritorious.

Vanity is so secure in the heart of man that everyone wants to be admired: even I who write this, and you who read this.

Excuse me, pray." Without that excuse I would not have known there was anything amiss.

Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion.