I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

This notion [skepticism] is more clearly understood by asking "What do I know?"

Life in itself is neither good nor evil, it is the place of good and evil, according to what you make it.

Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.

We perceive no charms that are not sharpened, puffed out, and inflated by artifice. Those which glide along naturally and simply easily escape a sight so gross as ours.

No one should be subjected to force over things which belonged to him.

Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength.