In general, children, like men, and men, like children, prefer entertainment to education.

Philosophy is as far separated from impiety as religion is from fanaticism.

Those authors into whose hands nature has placed a magic wand, with which they no sooner touch us than we forget the unhappiness in life, than the darkness leaves our soul, and we are reconciled to existence, should be placed among the benefactors of the human race.

Give, but, if possible, spare the poor man the shame of begging.

We swallow with one gulp the lie that flatters us, and drink drop by drop the truth which is bitter to us.

Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.

What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your own days.