The only shame is to have none.

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.

Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first.

True eloquence makes light of eloquence. True morality makes light of morality.

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

We need not have the loftiest mind to understand that here is no lasting and real satisfaction, that our pleasures are only vanity, that our evils are infinite, and, lastly, that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being forever either annihilated or unhappy.

There is nothing so insupportable to man as to be in entire repose, without passion, occupation, amusement, or application. Then it is that he feels his own nothingness, isolation, insignificance, dependent nature, powerless, emptiness. Immediately there issue from his soul ennui, sadness, chagrin, vexation, despair.