We cannot wish for that we know not.

All is a miracle. The stupendous order of nature, the revolution of a hundred millions of worlds around a million of stars, the activity of light, the life of all animals, all are grand and perpetual miracles.

It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.

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.

The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

True greatness consists in the use of a powerful understanding to enlighten oneself and others.

Constant happiness is the philosopher's stone of the soul.