“All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.”

If you do not love too much, you do not love enough.

If you want others to have a good opinion of you, say nothing.

How hollow is the heart of man, and how full of excrement!

Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.

Good deeds, when concealed, are the most admirable.

Having been unable to strengthen justice, we have justified strength.

One-half of the ills of life come because men are unwilling to sit down quietly for thirty minutes to think through all the possible consequences of their acts.

It’s not those who write the laws that have the greatest impact on society. It’s those who write the songs.

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.

Human life is thus only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy.

Plurality which is not reduced to unity is confusion; unity which does not depend on plurality is tyranny.

The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in others.

Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.

If I believe in God and life after death and you do not, and if there is no God, we both lose when we die. However, if there is a God, you still lose and I gain everything.