The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.

Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.

The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little.

What we love intensely or for a long time we are likely to bring within the citadel, and to assert as part of oneself.

In order to forgive reason for the evil it has wrought on the majority of men, we must imagine for ourselves what man would be without his reason. 'Tis a necessary evil.

If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor.

Nearly all men are slaves for the same reason that the Spartans assigned for the servitude of the Persians -- lack of power to pronounce the syllable, "No." To be able to utter that word and live alone, are the only means to preserve one's freedom and one's character.