You can purchase the mind of Pascal for a crown. Pleasures even cheaper are sold to those who give themselves up to them. It is only luxuries and objects of caprice that are rare and difficult to obtain; unfortunately they are the only things that touch the curiosity and taste of ordinary men.

The greatest evil that fortune can bring to men is to endow them with feeble resources and yet to make them ambitious.

In a way, the main fault of all books is that they are too long.

We must expect everything and fear everything from time and from men.

Men despise great projects when they do not feel themselves capable of great successes.

No one is more liable to make mistakes than he who acts only on reflexion.

A man who love only himself and his pleasures is vain, presumptuous, and wicked even from principle.