What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.

What a chimera then is man. What a novelty! What a monster... what a contradiction, what a prodigy

The philosophers talk to you about the dignity of man, and they tempt you to pride, or they talk to you about the misery of man, and they tempt you to despair.

Eloquence is a way of saying things in such a way, first, that those to whom we speak may listen to them without pain and with pleasure, and second, that they feel themselves interested, so that self-love leads them more willingly to reflection upon it.

Eloquence; it requires the pleasant and the real; but the pleasant must itself be drawn from the true.

What amazes me most is to see that everyone is not amazed at his own weakness.