I aim here only at revealing myself, who will perhaps be different tomorrow, if I learn something new which changes me.

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.

My opinion is that we must lend ourselves to others and give ourselves only to ourselves. If my will happened to be prone to mortgage and attach itself, I would not last: I am too tender, both by nature and by practice.

A little of everything and nothing thoroughly, after the French fashion.

The beginnings of all things are weak and tender. We must therefore be clear-sighted in the beginnings, for, as in their budding we discern not the danger, so in their full growth we perceive not the remedy.

It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine undertstanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits.