A minister of state is excusable for the harm he does when the helm of government has forced his hand in a storm; but in the calm he is guilty of all the good he does not do.

I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?

Answer me, you who believe that animals are only machines. Has nature arranged for this animal to have all the machinery of feelings only in order for it not to have any at all?

A good cook is a certain slow poisoner, if you are not temperate.

Doctors put drugs of which they know little into bodies of which they know less for diseases of which they know nothing at all.

Liberty, then, about which so many volumes have been written is, when accurately defined, only the power of acting.

Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.