"I may be no better, but at least I am different."

"He who is most slow in making a promise is the most faithful in performance of it."

"Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals."

"I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don't know."

"We do not know what is really good or bad fortune."

"Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves."

"O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it."

"To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know."

"Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost."

"Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being."

"Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion."

"What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?"

"Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million."

"Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil."

"The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries itself the causes of its destruction."

"I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself."

"The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it."