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.

It is not shameful for a man to succumb to pain and it is shameful to succumb to pleasure.

We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

The captain of a ship is not chosen from those of the passengers who comes from the best family.

One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however, it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions; who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it, sleep. As a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another.

We like to be deceived.