Success in the majority of circumstances depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed..

In vain do we seek tranquility in the desert; temptations are always with us; our passions, represented by the demons, never let us alone: those mons….

The spirit of commerce is frugality, economy, moderation, labor, ponderance, tranquillity, order, and rule. So long as this spirit subsides, the rich….

[The Pope] will make the king believe that three are only one, that the bread he eats is not bread... and a thousand other things of the same kind..

Power ought to serve as a check to power..

When the body of the people is possessed of the supreme power, it is called a democracy..

Lunch kills half of Paris, supper the other half..

A prince who loves and fears religion is a lion who stoops to the hand that strokes or to the voice that appeases him. He who fears and hates religio….

The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any cou….

We must have constantly present in our minds the difference between independence and liberty. Liberty is a right of doing whatever the laws permit, a….

I suffer from the disease of writing books and being ashamed of them when they are finished..

Wherever I find envy I take a pleasure in provoking it: I always praise before an envious man those who make him grow pale..

I like peasants-they are not sophisticated enough to reason speciously..

Ever since the invention of gunpowder.. I continually tremble lest men should, in the end, uncover some secret which would provide a short way of abo….

When a government is arrived to that degree of corruption as to be incapable of reforming itself, it would not lose much by being new moulded..

The power of divorce can be given only to those who feel the inconveniences of marriage, and who are sensible of the moment when it is for their inte….

That anyone who possesses power has a tendency to abuse it is an eternal truth. They tend to go as far as the barriers will allow..

The Ottoman Empire whose sick body was not supported by a mild and regular diet, but by a powerful treatment, which continually exhausted it..

An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war..

There is no nation so powerful, as the one that obeys its laws not from principals of fear or reason, but from passion..

Talent is a gift which God has given us secretly, and which we reveal without perceiving it..