Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.

Generally we obtain very surely and very speedily what we are not too anxious to obtain.

We do not know what really good or bad fortune is.

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.

I love idleness. I love to busy myself about trifles, to begin a hundred things and not finish one of them, to come and go as my fancy bids me, to change my plan every moment, to follow a fly in all its circlings, to try and uproot a rock to see what is underneath, eagerly to begin a ten-years' task to give it up after ten minutes: in short, to fritter away the whole day inconsequentially and incoherently, and to follow nothing but the whim of the moment.