Will is wish, and liberty is power.

It must be confessed that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men than the inventors of syllogisms.

A multitude of laws in a country is like a great number of physicians, a sign of weakness and malady.

He was my equal in beauty, a paragon of grace and charm, sparkling with wit, and burning with love. I adored him to distraction, to the point of idolatry: I loved him as one can never love twice.

Everything happens through immutable laws, ...everything is necessary... There are, some persons say, some events which are necessary and others which are not. It would be very comic that one part of the world was arranged, and the other were not; that one part of what happens had to happen and that another part of what happens did not have to happen. If one looks closely at it, one sees that the doctrine contrary to that of destiny is absurd; but there are many people destined to reason badly; others not to reason at all others to persecute those who reason.

A good action is preferable to an argument.

History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below.