Evil spawns evil. The first experience of torture gives an understanding of the pleasure in tormenting others.

A strange thing, the human heart in general, and woman's heart in particular.

For what did the creator prepare me,Why did he so terribly contradictThe hopes of my youth?

Happy people are ignoramuses and glory is nothing else but success, and to achieve it one only has to be cunning.

The history of a man's soul, even the pettiest soul, is hardly less interesting and useful than the history of a whole people; especially when the former is the result of the observations of a mature mind upon itself, and has been written without any egotistical desire of arousing sympathy or astonishment. Rousseau's Confessions has precisely this defect – he read it to his friends.

In simple hearts the feeling for the beauty and grandeur of nature is a hundred-fold stronger and more vivid than in us, ecstatic composers of narratives in words and on paper.

We practically always excuse things when we understand them