“My love for imaginary objects and my facility in lending myself to them ended by disillusioning me with everything around me, and determined that love of solitude which I have retained ever since that time.”

There is peace in dungeons, but is that enough to make dungeons desirable?

I perceive God everywhere in His works. I sense Him in me; I see Him all around me.

Man’s first law is to watch over his own preservation; his first care he owes to himself; and as soon as he reaches the age of reason, he becomes the only judge of the best means to preserve himself; he becomes his own master.

Trust your heart rather than your head.

The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.

Nothing on this earth is worth buying at the price of human blood.

I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices.

The social pact, far from destroying natural equality, substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and lawful equality for whatever physical inequality that nature may have imposed on mankind; so that however unequal in strength and intelligence, men become equal by covenant and by right.

A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty.

Girls should learn that so much finery is only put on to hide defects, and that the triumph of beauty is to shine by itself.

To renounce freedom is to renounce one’s humanity, one’s rights as a man and equally one’s duties.

We cannot teach children the danger of lying to men without feeling as men, the greater danger of lying to children.

Alas, it is when we are beginning to leave this mortal body that it most offends us!

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.

I have never thought, for my part, that man’s freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.

It is a great evil for a Chief of a nation to be born the enemy of the freedom whose defender he should be.

My imagination would run wild in the hills.

You never imagine that when you say hello to someone and you fall in love, that some day you’ll have to say goodbye.

We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination.

What you call magic is nothing more than an act of the imagination fired by the senses, then given shape by the power of your aura.

I just woke up and found a large butterfly on me. When did that happen?

There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits to the human capacity for intelligence, imagination, and wonder.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.