Choose well. Your choice is brief, and yet endless.

Divide and command, a wise maxim; Unite and guide, a better.

Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man.

What a torment it is to see so much loveliness passing and repassing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold of it!

Ill-humor is nothing more than an inward feeling of our own want of merit, a dissatisfaction with ourselves which is always united with an envy that foolish vanity excites.

There is no patriotic art and no patriotic science.

Man... knows only when he is satisfied and when he suffers, and only his sufferings and his satisfactions instruct him concerning himself, teach him what to seek and what to avoid. For the rest, man is a confused creature; he knows not whence he comes or whither he goes, he knows little of the world, and above all, he knows little of himself.