“Talent is a gift which God has given us secretly, and which we reveal without perceiving it.”

A nation may lose its liberties in a day and not miss them in a century.

Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.

Love of reading enables a man to exchange the weary hours, which come to every one, for hours of delight.

Study has been for me the sovereign remedy against all the disappointments of life. I have never known any trouble that an hour’s reading would not dissipate.

Countries are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility, but to their liberty.

The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed.

When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it and avarice possesses the whole community.

At our coming into the world we contract an immense debt to our country, which we can never discharge.

Luxury ruins republics; poverty, monarchies.

It is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.

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 am necessarily a man, and only accidentally am I French.

Trade is the best cure for prejudice.

It is difficult for the united states to be all of equal power and extent.

Knowledge humanizes mankind, and reason inclines to mildness; but prejudices eradicate every tender disposition.

The love of study is in us the only lasting passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruins.

In constitutional states, liberty is compensation for heavy taxes; in dictatorships, the subsititue is light taxes.

That is the exciting thing: I don’t know what God has given me for tomorrow.

Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.

Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it.

Considering how much we are all given to discuss the characters of others, and discuss them often not in the strictest spirit of charity.

The power of divorce can be given only to those who feel the inconveniences of marriage, and who are sensible of the moment when it is for their interest to make them cease.

Writers don’t need to be given formulas; they need to be shown possibilities.

If your government had given me a thousandth of the sum it spent to depose me, I could have won that war.

Life was given to me as a favor, so I may abandon it when it is one no longer.