My life's dream has been a perpetual nightmare.

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

Sensual pleasure passes and vanishes, but the friendship between us, the mutual confidence, the delight of the heart, the enchantment of the soul, these things do not perish and can never be destroyed.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

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

Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances. It is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.