My bad head cannot adjust itself to the way things are.... If I want to depict spring, it has to be in wintertime; if I want to describe a beautiful landscape, I must be enclosed within walls; and I have said a hundred times that if I were put in the Bastille, there I would paint a picture of liberty.

Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.

Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given to us by education.

In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a gaurantee of impunity.

As soon as any man says of the affairs of the State "What does it matter to me?" the State may be given up for lost.

It is in man's heart that the life of nature's spectacle exists; to see it, one must feel it.

Presence of mind, penetration, fine observation, are the sciences of women; ability to avail themselves of these is their talent.