The straight line cannot proceed through the torturous twists of life.

Metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, and the poetic faculty must submerge the whole mind in the senses. Metaphysics soars up to universals, and the poetic faculty must plunge deep into particulars.

Political Science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is not pious cannot be truly wise.

People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner distress and disturbance, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind.

Governments must be conformable to the nature of the governed; governments are even a result of that nature.

Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race.

It is true that men themselves made this world of nations... but this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves.