Antiquity is full of the praises of another antiquity still more remote.

I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of virtue.

The only reward to be expected from literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.

We have our arts, the ancients had theirs... We cannot raise obelisks a hundred feet high in a single piece, but our meridians are more exact.

Everything's fine today, that is our illusion.

Custom, law bent my first years to the religion of the happy Muslims. I see it too clearly: the care taken of our childhood forms our feelings, our habits, our belief. By the Ganges I would have been a slave of the false gods, a Christian in Paris, a Muslim here.

No opinion is worth burning your neighbor for.