To how many blockheads of my time has a cold and taciturn demeanor procured the credit of prudence and capacity!

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

He who falls obstinate in his courage, if he falls he fights from his knees.

God defend me from being an honest man according to the description which every day I see made by each man to his own glorification

If atoms do, by chance, happen to combine themselves into so many shapes, why have they never combined together to form a house or a slipper? By the same token, why do we not believe that if innumerable letters of the Greek alphabet were poured all over the market-place they would eventually happen to form the text of the Iliad?

Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.

Some, either from being glued to vice by a natural attachment, or from long habit, no longer recognize its ugliness.