It is presumed that there exists a great unity in nature, in respect of the adequacy of a single cause to account for many different kinds of consequences.

No state at war with another state should engage in hostilities of such a kind as to render mutual confidence impossible when peace will have been made.

There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish.

But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained, as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is [to be] avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination's freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination.

Give me matter, and I will construct a world out of it!

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.

Heaven has given human beings three things to balance the odds of life: hope, sleep, and laughter.