Good company, lively conversation, and the endearments of friendship fill the mind with great pleasure.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Society is indeed a contract. ... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.

The truly sublime is always easy, and always natural.

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.

You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.

We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.