There is no knowledge for which so great a price is paid as a knowledge of the world; and no one ever became an adept in it except at the expense of a hardened or a wounded heart.

The most certain mode of making people content with us is to make them content with themselves.

People are always willing to follow advice when it accords with their own wishes.

Conversation is the legs on which thought walks; and writing, the wings by which it flies.

Modern historians are all would-be philosophers; who, instead of relating facts as they occurred, give us their version, or rather perversions of them, always colored by their political prejudices, or distorted to establish some theory . . .

Superstition is but the fear of belief.

Life would be as insupportable without the prospect of death, as it would be without sleep.