All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

By space, the universe encompasses and swallows me as a particle; by thought, I encompass it.

Curiosity is only vanity. Most frequently we wish not to know, but to talk. We would not take a sea voyage for the sole pleasure of seeing without hope of ever telling.

Earthly things must be known to be loved; divine things must be loved to be known.

Fear not, provided you fear; but if you fear not, then fear.

Force rules the world, and not opinion; but opinion is that which makes use of force.

If a laborer were to dream for twelve hours every night that he was a king, I believe he would be almost as happy as a king who should dream for twelve hours every night that he was a laborer.

If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's inability to sit still in a room.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

It is not only old and early impressions that deceive us; the charms of novelty have the same power.

Justice without strength is powerless, strength without justice is tyrannical... Therefore, unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.

Kind words do not cost much. They never blister the tongue or lips. They make other people good-natured. They also produce their own image on men's souls, and a beautiful image it is.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

Men never do evil so fully and so happily as when they do it for conscience's sake.

Nature confuses the skeptics and reason confutes the dogmatists.

Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

The captain of a ship is not chosen from those of the passengers who comes from the best family.

The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in men. Ordinary people see no difference between men.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who believe themselves sinners; the sinners who believe themselves righteous.

The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, indicates a strange inversion.

The strength of a man's virtue must not be measured by his efforts, but by his ordinary life.

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.

Who is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who is not unhappy at having only one eye?

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have a different effect.