When everyone is moving towards depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if someone stops he shows up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fixed point.

Reason is the slow and torturous method by which those who do not know the truth discover it

No animal admires another animal.

Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside.

It is right that what is just should be obeyed. It is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed.

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

We are not satisfied with real life; we want to live some imaginary life in the eyes of other people and to seem different from what we actually are.