Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it makes them happy, as against reason, which only makes its friends wretched: one covers them with glory, the other with shame.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

Who knows if this other half of life where we think we're awake is not another sleep a little different from the first.

One of the greatest artifices the devil uses to engage men in vice and debauchery, is to fasten names of contempt on certain virtues, and thus fill weak souls with a foolish fear of passing for scrupulous, should they desire to put them in practice.

How vain painting is-we admire the realistic depiction of objects which in their original state we don't admire at all.

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.

Human life is thus only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy.