Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.

There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.

How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

Certain souls may seem harsh to others, but it is just a way, beknownst only to them, of caring and feeling more deeply.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse's breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature's laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.