All men are born truthful and die liars.

The mind reaches great heights only by spurts.

Glory fills the world with virtue, and, like a beneficent sun, covers the whole earth with flowers and with fruits.

The generality of men are so bound within the sphere of their circumstances that they have not even the courage to get out of them through their ideas, and if we see a few whom, in a way, speculation over great things makes incapable of mean ones, we find still more with whom the practice of small things takes away the feeling for great ones.

The most absurd and reckless aspirations have sometimes led to extraordinary success.

The mind is the soul's eye, not its source of power. That lies in the heart, in other words, in the passions.

The heaviest object in the world is the body of the woman you have ceased to love.