Not seeing people permits us to imagine them with every perfection.

The learned man knows that he is ignorant.

There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.

But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God's fault for not making man and the devil of equal strength.

To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time, especially in that kind of mock rurality, ugly but odd, and partaking of two natures, which surrounds certain large cities, particularly Paris.

A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.

Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly.