A man who has tasted with profound enjoyment the pleasure of agreeable society will eat with a greater appetite than he who rode horseback for two hours. An amusing lecture is as useful for health as the exercise of the body.

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.

Man's greatest concern is to know how he shall properly fill his place in the universe and correctly understand what he must be in order to be a man.

Nothing is divine but what is agreeable to reason.

It is often necessary to make a decision on the basis of knowledge sufficient for action but insufficient to satisfy the intellect.

[S]uppose the mind of [a] friend of humanity were clouded over with his own grief, extinguishing all sympathetic participation in the fate of others; he still has the resources to be beneficent to those suffering distress, but the distress of others does not touch him because he is sufficiently busy with his own; and now, where no inclination any longer stimulates him to it, he tears himself out of his deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination, solely from duty.

Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt