If you wish to obtain a great name or to found an establishment, be completely mad; but be sure that your madness corresponds with the turn and temper of your age.

I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc. It does not behoove us, who were only savages and barbarians when these Indians and Chinese peoples were civilized and learned, to dispute their antiquity.

If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Dare to think for yourself.

But in this country it is necessary, now and then, to put one admiral to death in order to inspire the others to fight.