The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.

To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.

You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again.

The tone of good conversation is brilliant and natural; it is neither tedious nor frivolous; it is instructive without pedantry, gay without tumultuousness, polished without affectation, gallant without insipidity, waggish without equivocation.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.

Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them.

A citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them.