Discipline is, in a manner, nothing else but the art of inspiring the soldiers with greater fear of their officers than of the enemy. This fear has often the effect of courage: but it cannot prevail against the fierce and obstinate valor of people animated by fanaticism, or warm love of their country.

Pleasure and pain are the only springs of action in man, and always will be.

Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.

Envy honors the dead in order to insult the living.

A man who believes that he eats his God we do not call mad; yet, a man who says he is Jesus Christ, we call mad.

When a miser contents himself with giving nothing, and saving what he has got, and is in other respects guilty of no injustice, he is, perhaps, of all bad men the least injurious to society; the evil he does is properly nothing more than the omission of the good he might do. If, of all the vices, avarice is the most generally detested, it is the effect of an avidity common to all men; it is because men hate those from whom they can expect nothing. The greedy misers rail at sordid misers.

Truth is a torch which gleams in the fog but does not dispel it.