The opportunity of making happy is more scarce than we imagine; the punishment of missing it is, never to meet with it again; and the use we make of it leaves us an eternal sentiment of satisfaction or repentance.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

I bold it impossible, that the great monarchies of Europe can subsist much longer; they all affect magnificence and splendor.

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.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

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

The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right.