The concern that some women show at the absence of their husbands, does not arise from their not seeing them and being with them, but from their apprehension that their husbands are enjoying pleasures in which they do not participate, and which, from their being at a distance, they have not the power of interrupting.

The truth of these days is not that which really is, but what every man persuades another man to believe.

There is nothing useless in nature; not even uselessness itself

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.

Some, either from being glued to vice by a natural attachment, or from long habit, no longer recognize its ugliness.

Every man has within himself the entire human condition

The worth of the mind consisteth not in going high, but in marching orderly.