Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.

Every condition of the soul has its own sign and expression...So you will see how hard it is to seem original without being so.

I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.

It is a great shame; most of our words are misused tools / which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners / desecrated them.

One is rarely an impulsive innovator after the age of sixty, but one can still be a very fine orderly and inventive thinker. One rarely procreates children at that age, but one is all the more skilled at educating those who have already been procreated, and education is procreation of another kind.