It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

Historians are gossips who tease the dead

We offer up prayers to god only because we have made him after our own image. We treat him like a pasha, or a sultan, who is capable of being exasperated and appeased.

Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.

Our character is composed of our ideas and our feelings: and, since it has been proved that we give ourselves neither feelings nor ideas, our character does not depend on us. If it did depend on us, there is nobody who would not be perfect. If one does not reflect, one thinks oneself master of everything; but when one does reflect, one realizes that one is master of nothing

The more he became truly wise, the more he distrusted everything he knew.

What is not in nature can never be true.