I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.

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

How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don't want to die!

If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.

No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.

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

When we know to read our own hearts, we acquire wisdom of the heartsof others.