To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.

In any close society it is more urgent to restrain others than to be free oneself. Hence the tendency for the central authority to absorb and supersede such as are local or delegated.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.

People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.