Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.

Love childhood, indulge its sports, its pleasures, its delightful instincts. Who has not sometimes regretted that age when laughter was ever on the lips, and when the heart was ever at peace?

Taste is, so to speak, the microscope of the judgment.

Every free action has two causes that come together to produce it. One is moral, the will that determines the act; the other is physical, the power that executes the will to act.

It has always pleased me to read while eating if I have no companion; it gives me the society I lack. I devour alternately a page and a mouthful; it is as though my book were dining with me.

An honest man nearly always thinks justly.

I will say little of the importance of a good education; nor will I stop to prove that the current one is bad. Countless others have done so before me, and I do not like to fill a book with things everybody knows. I will note that for the longest time there has been nothing but a cry against the established practice without anyone taking it upon himself to propose a better one. The literature and the learning of our age tend much more to destruction than to edification.