“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘this is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.”

To do is to be.

The sociable man, always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinions of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment.

If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?

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

To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.

I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of being, in identifying myself with the whole of nature..

There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.

What good is it looking for our happiness in the opinion of others if we can find it in ourselves?

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

What wisdom can you find greater than kindness.

One does not drink. One gives a kiss to his glass, and the wine returns a caress to you.

However great a man’s natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man

Being wealthy isn’t just a question of having lots of money. It’s a question of what we want. Wealth isn’t an absolute, it’s relative to desire. Every time we seek something that we can’t afford, we can be counted as poor, how much money we may actually have.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.