The reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits.

How often our involuntary facial motions testify to the thoughts we were keeping secret, and betray us to those around!

Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.

.. since it was true that study, even when done properly, can only teach us what wisdom, right conduct and determination consist in, they wanted to put their children directly in touch with actual cases, teaching them not by hearsay but by actively assaying them, vigorously molding and forming them not merely by word and precept but chiefly by deeds and examples, so that wisdom should not be something which the soul knows but the soul's very essence and temperament, not something acquired but a natural property.

Que sçais-je?" (What do I know?)

The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from Custom.

A woman is no sooner ours than we are no longer hers.