Now there cannot be first principles for men, unless the Divinity has revealed them; all the rest--beginning, middle, and end--isnothing but dreams and smoke.

We cannot do without it, and yet we disgrace and vilify the same. It may be compared to a cage, the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair to get out.

We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade; our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrary things, and one part is no less necessary than the other.

Desire and hope will push us on toward the future.

He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the sea.

I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.

Anyone who does not feel sufficiently strong in memory should not meddle with lying.