Now, you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will....The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated.

You must have the devil in you to succeed in the arts.

I was never ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one.

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

A torch lighted in the forests of America set all Europe in conflagration.

Whatever you do, crush the infamous thing, and love those who love you.

It is the first law of friendship that it has to be cultivated. The second is to be indulgent when the first law is neglected.