Self-love is an instrument useful but dangerous; it often wounds the hand which makes use of it, and seldom does good without doing harm.

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

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.

In truth, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all possess something and none has too much.

A man speaks of what he knows, a woman of what pleases her: the one requires knowledge, the other taste.

Universal silence is taken to imply the consent of the people.

An honest man nearly always thinks justly.