Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts.

When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.

The greatest happiness is to transform one's feelings into action.

Nature, who permits no two leaves to be exactly alike, has given a still greater diversity to human minds. Imitation, then, is a double murder; for it deprives both copy and original of their primitive existence.

[On Russia:] In every way, there is something gigantic about this people: ordinary dimensions have no applications whatever to it. I do not mean by this that true greatness and stability are never met with; but their boldness, their imaginativeness knows no bounds. With them everything is colossal rather than well-proportioned, audacious rather than well-considered, and if they do not attain their goals, it is because they exceed them.

Men have made of fortune an all-powerful goddess, in order that she may be made responsible for all their blunder's.

nothing is so horrifying as the possibility of existing simply because we do not know how to die.