Too much apparatus, designed to guide us in experiments and to supplement the exactness of our senses, makes us neglect to use those senses...The more ingenious our apparatus, the coarser and more unskillful are our senses. We surround ourselves with tools and fail to use those which nature has provided every one of us.

Temperance and labor are the two real physicians of man.

With children use force; with men reason; such is the natural order of things. The wise man requires no law.

There is no folly of which a man who is not a fool cannot get rid except vanity; of this nothing cures a man except experience of its bad consequences, if indeed anything can cure it.

Liberty is obedience to the law which one has laid down for oneself

I loved too sincerely, too completely, I venture to say, to be able to be happy easily.

I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.