Some men seem remarkable to the world in whom neither their wives nor their valets saw anything extraordinary. Few men have been admired by their servants.

What we are told of the inhabitants of Brazil, that they never die but of old age, is attributed to the tranquility and serenity of their climate; I rather attribute it to the tranquility and serenity of their souls, which are free from all passion, thought, or any absorbing and unpleasant labors. Those people spend their lives in an admirable simplicity and ignorance, without letters, without law, without king, without any manner of religion.

If faces were not alike, we could not distinguish men from beasts; if they were not different, we could not tell one man from another.

A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children's affection than the need they have of his assistance, if that can be called affection.

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.

The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom.

It is indeed the boundary of life, beyond which we are not to pass; which the law of nature has pitched for a limit not to be exceeded.