I love a friendship that flatters itself in the sharpness and vigor of its communications.

Lying is a terrible vice, it testifies that one despises God, but fears men.

If not for that of conscience, yet at least for ambition's sake, let us reject ambition, let us disdain that thirst of honor and renown, so low and mendicant; that it makes us beg it of all sorts of people.

Nature clasps all her creatures in a universal embrace; there is not one of them which she has not plainly furnished with all means necessary to the conservation of its being.

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.

He loves little who loves by rule.

And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?