Man is a central creature between the animals, that is to say, the most perfect form, which unites the traits of all in the most complete epitome.

Touch not the flute when drums are sounding around; when fools have the word, the wise will be silent.

The working of revolutions misleads me no more; it is as necessary to our race as its waves to the stream, that it may not be a stagnant marsh. Ever renewed in its forms, the genius of humanity blossoms.

Say oh wise man how you have come to such knowledge? Because I was never ashamed to confess my ignorance and ask others.

The friend who holds up before me the mirror, conceals not my smallest faults, warns me kindly, reproves me affectionately, when I have not performed my duty, he is my friend, however little he may appear so. But if a man praises and lauds me, never reproves me, overlooks my faults, and forgives them before I have repented, he is my enemy, however much he may appear my friend.

The savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species

All our science calculates with abstracted individual external marks, which do not touch the inner existence of any single thing