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.

My ideas are my whores.

I feel, I think, I judge; therefore, a part of organized matter like me is capable of feeling, thinking, and judging.

Shakespeare's fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.

One may demand of me that I should seek truth, but not that I should find it

If you disturb the colors of the rainbow, the rainbow is no longer beautiful.

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.