Don't wait to be happy to laugh... You may die and never have laughed.

It is easier to enrich ourselves with a thousand virtues, than to correct ourselves of a single fault.

An assembly of the states, a court of justice, shows nothing so serious and grave as a table of gamesters playing very high; a melancholy solicitude clouds their looks; envy and rancor agitate their minds while the meeting lasts, without regard to friendship, alliances, birth or distinctions.

Party loyalty lowers the greatest men to the petty level of the masses.

You think him to be your dupe; if he feigns to be so who is the greater dupe, he or you?

From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light. Like those extraordinary stars of whose origins we are ignorant, and of whose fate, once they have vanished, we know even less, such men have neither forebears nor descendants: they are the whole of their race.

Poverty may be the mother of crime, but lack of good sense is the father.