Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

Laws are always useful to those who possess and vexatious to those who have nothing.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.

There is no folly of which a man who is not a fool cannot get rid except vanity; of this nothing cures a man except experience of its bad consequences, if indeed anything can cure it.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.