Indolence is sweet, and its consequences bitter.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.

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?

Never having been able to succeed in the world, he took his revenge by speaking ill of it.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.

There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics. ... We repeat, there was far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer.

A circumstance which has always appeared wonderful to me, is that such sublime discoveries should have been made by the sole assistance of a quadrant and a little arithmetic.