A constitution that is made for all nations is made for none. |
All pain is a punishment, and every punishment is inflicted for love as much as for justice. |
Every country has the government it deserves. |
False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing. |
I don't know what a scoundrel is like, but I know what a respectable man is like, and it's enough to make one's flesh creep. |
If there was no moral evil upon earth, there would be no physical evil. |
In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. |
In the works of man, everything is as poor as its author; vision is confined, means are limited, scope is restricted, movements are labored, and results are humdrum. |
It can even come about that a created will cancels out, not perhaps the exertion, but the result of divine action; for in this sense, God himself has told us that God wishes things which do not happen because man does not wish them! Thus the rights of men are immense, and his greatest misfortune is to be unaware of them. |
It is one of man's curious idiosyncrasies to create difficulties for the pleasure of resolving them. |
Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free. |
Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not. People complain of the despotism of princes; they ought to complain of the despotism of man. |
Nothing is necessary except God, and nothing is less necessary than pain. |
There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections. |
To know how to wait. It is the great secret of success. |