The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.

The propriety of some persons seems to consist in having improper thoughts about their neighbors.

Reason teaches us that what is good is good for something, and that what is good for nothing is not good at all.

One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.

The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.