Death is easier to bear without thinking of it, than the thought of death without peril.

Nothing is so conformable to reason as to disavow reason.

Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.

Nature, which alone is good, is wholly familiar and common.

The pagans do not know God, and love only the earth. The Jews know the true God, and love only the earth. The Christians know the true God, and do not love the earth.

Justice and truth are two such subtle points, that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

We have so exalted a notion of the human soul that we cannot bear to be despised, or even not to be esteemed by it. Man, in fact, places all his happiness in this esteem.