I have not the hope of being immortal, because the desire of it has not given me that vanity.

In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice.

It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.

Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.

At an early age I sucked up the milk of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Anacreon, Plato and Euripides, diluted with that of Moses and the prophets.

There's a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness.

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.