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

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

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

The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.

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.

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

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.