“Nature is never so admired as when she is understood.”

I have lived one hundred years; and I die with the consolation of never having thrown the slightest ridicule upon the smallest virtue.

The judgment may be compared to a clock or watch, where the most ordinary machine is sufficient to tell the hours; but the most elaborate alone can point out the minutes and seconds, and distinguish the smallest differences of time.

A work of morality, politics, criticism will be more elegant, other things being equal, if it is shaped by the hand of geometry.

Mathematicians are like lovers. Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this consequence another.

We must always skim over pleasures. They are like marshy lands that we must travel nimbly, hardly daring to put down our feet.

As astronomy is the daughter of idleness, geometry is the daughter of property.

Since the princes take the Earth for their own, it’s fair that the philosophers reserve the sky for themselves and rule there, but they should never permit the entry of others.

It is beauty that begins to please, and tenderness that completes the cbarm.

Our sun enlightens the planets that belong to him; why may not every fixed star also have planets to which they give light?

A true philosopher is like an elephant; he never puts the second foot down until the first one is solidly in place.

A philospher sees the Earth as a large planet, travelling through the heavens, covered with fools

I feel nothing, apart from a certain difficulty in continuing to exist.

It takes time to ruin a world, but time is all it takes.

If I had my hand full of truth, I would take good care how I opened it.

People almost always do great things without knowing how to do them, and are quite surprised to have done them.

Truth comes home to the mind so naturally, that when we learn it for the first time, it seems as though we did no more than recall it to our memory.