If you want others to have a good opinion of you, say nothing.

There are two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason. The supreme achievement of reason is to realise that there is a limit to reason. Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realise that.

We are only troubled by the fears which we, and not nature, give ourselves, for they add to the state in which we are the passions of the state in which we are not.

We are so presumptuous that we should like to be known all over the world, even by people who will only come when we are no more. Such is our vanity that the good opinion of half a dozen of the people around us gives us pleasure and satisfaction.

Instinct teaches us to look for happiness outside ourselves.

When some passion or effect is described in a natural style, we find within ourselves the truth of what we hear, without knowing it was there.

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.