If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they "artialize" nature.

Let us not be ashamed to speak what we shame not to think.

The common notions that we find in credit around us and infused into our souls by our fathers' seed, these seem to be the universal and natural ones. Whence it comes to pass that what is off the hinges of custom, people believe to be off the hinges of reason.

Nobody is exempt from saying stupid things, the harm is to do it presumptuously.

One open way of speaking introduces another open way of speaking, and draws out discoveries, like wine and love.

Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy; research, the progress; ignorance, the end. There is, by heavens, a strong and generous kind of ignorance that yields nothing, for honour and courage, to knowledge: an ignorance to conceive which needs no less knowledge than to conceive knowledge.

This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.