What is called happiness is an abstract idea, composed of various ideas of pleasure; for he who has but a moment of pleasure is not a happy man, in like manner that a moment of grief constitutes not a miserable one.
To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.
I hate women because they always know where things are.
It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.
Friends should be preferred to kings.
You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.