Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages.

Friendship is the highest degree of perfection in society.

A foreign war is a lot milder than a civil war.

If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time; it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price.

As soon as women become ours we are no longer theirs.

Now, since everything else is furnished with the exact amount of needle and thread required to maintain its being, it is in truth incredible that we alone should be brought into the world in a defective and indigent state, in a state such that we cannot maintain ourselves without external aid.

Lay a beam between these two towers of such width as we need to walk on: there is no philosophical wisdom of such great firmness that it can give us courage to walk on it as we should if it were on the ground.