I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.

As great enmities spring from great friendships, and mortal distempers from vigorous health, so do the most surprising and the wildest frenzies from the high and lively agitations of our souls.

We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.

Men are nothing until they are excited.

There is no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally.

A man never speaks of himself without losing something. What he says in his disfavor is always beleived, but when he commends himself, he arouses mistrust.

When all is summed up, a man never speaks of himself without loss; his accusations of himself are always believed; his praises never.