“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.”

Nothing can be more destructive to ambition, and the passion for conquest, than the true system of astronomy. What a poor thing is even the whole globe in comparison of the infinite extent of nature!

Neatness is a crowning grace of womanhood.

Nature is never so admired as when she is understood.

Hardly anyone knows how much is gained by ignoring the future.

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

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.

I got drunk in Canada. I was there for 2 days but I was drunk there for 4 days. I don’t know how it worked. I guess it was with the time difference or something.

You must know that there are different tastes. There are also different powers of digestion… different temperaments… differences in the capacity to comprehend.

All the different nations in the world, despite their differences of appearance and religion and language and way of life, still have one thing in common, and that is what’s inside of all of us.

I have discovered that there is a crucial difference between society’s image of old people and ‘us’ as we know and feel ourselves to be.

In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful, white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line, but I can’t seem to get there now. I can’t seem to get over that line.

The difference between mercy and grace? Mercy gave the prodigal son a second chance. Grace gave him a feast.

The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.

But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted on.