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.

Smell is the sense of memory and desire.

I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossibility of attaining the real persons precipitated me into the land of chimeras; and seeing nothing that existed worthy of my exalted feelings, I fostered them in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings after my own heart.

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.

I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature.

We have to have powder for our wigs; that is why so many poor people have no bread.

Do you not know...that a child badly taught is farther from being wise than one not taught at all?