I like better for one to say some foolish thing upon important matters than to be silent. That becomes the subject of discussion and dispute, and the truth is discovered.

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

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!

Posterity for the philosopher is what the other world is for the religious man.

There is no true sovereign except the nation; there can be no true legislator except the people.

My ideas are my whores.

The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dice box in hand, shaking the dice.