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.

I serve your Beaune to my friends, but your Volnay I keep for myself.

Those who think are excessively few; and those few do not set themselves to disturb the world.

Let us leave every man at liberty to seek into him and to lose himself in his ideas.

Twenty-volume folios will never make a revolution. It’s the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared.

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.