People here argue about religion interminably, but it appears that they are competing at the same time to see who can be the least devout.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway.

There are only two cases in which war is just: first, in order to resist the aggression of an enemy, and second, in order to help an ally who has been attacked.

Two quite opposite qualities equally bias our minds – habits and novelty.

Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

Logic is the technique by which we add conviction to truth.

Power ought to serve as a check to power.

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.

Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.

There are three species of government: republican, monarchical, and despotic.

Men blush less for their crimes than for their weaknesses and vanity.

I have read descriptions of Paradise that would make any sensible person stop wanting to go there.

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

Love and friendship exclude each other.

Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one’s wit at the expense of one’s better nature.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, we will...

Religious wars are not caused by the fact that there is more than one religion, but by the spirit of intolerance… the spread of which can only be regarded as the total eclipse of human...

There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.

We should laugh before being happy, for fear of dying without having laughed.

I would as soon say that religion gives its professors a right to enslave those who dissent from it, in order to render its propagation more easy.

Man is an imagining being.

Next to sound judgment, diamonds and pearls are the rarest things in the world.

Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech… One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

They who assert that a blind fatality produced the various effects we behold in this world talk very absurdly; for can anything be more unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive...

There is only one thing that can form a bond between men, and that is gratitude… we cannot give someone else greater power over us than we have ourselves.

We must laugh before we are happy, for fear of dying without having laughed at all.

If I knew of something that could serve my nation but would ruin another, I would not propose it to my prince, for I am first a man and only then a Frenchman… because I...

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens...

Poverty may be the mother of crime, but lack of good sense is the father.

Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.

There is no original truth, only original error.

A man should be mourned at his birth, not at his death.

Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those...

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its brevity.

In bodies moved, the motion is received, increased, diminished, or lost, according to the relations of the quantity of matter and velocity; each diversity is uniformity, each change is constancy.

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth.

Society is the union of men and not the men themselves.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Although born in a prosperous realm, we did not believe that its boundaries should limit our knowledge, and that the lore of the East should alone enlighten us.

Weak minds exaggerate too much the wrong done to the Africans.

A mediocre mind thinks it writes divinely; a good mind thinks it writes reasonably.

Law in general is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases in which human reason...

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.