It is ourselves alone that make our days lucky or unlucky. Away, then, with a vain prejudice, the invention of the priesthood, which has been transmitted by our ancestors to an ignorant people.

Feeble verses are those which sin not against rules, but against genius.

Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively.

You have no control over the hand that life deals you, but how you play that hand is entirely up to you.

Now, you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will....The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.

The harmony of a concert, to which you listen with delight, must have on certain classes of minute animals the effect of terrible thunder; perhaps it kills them.