The art of subversion, of revolution, is to dislodge established customs by probing down to their origins in order to show how they lack authority and justice.

I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.

By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

Man lives between the infinitely large and the infinitely small.

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.

It is your own assent to yourself, and the constant voice of your own reason, and not of others, that should make you believe.