The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things..

After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contai….

A good thing which prevents us from enjoying a greater good is in truth an evil..

I saw that all things I feared, and which feared me, had nothing good or bad in them save insofar as the mind was affected by them..

Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men..

If anyone conceives, that an object of his love joins itself to another with closer bonds of friendship than he himself has attained to, he will be a….

Indulge yourself in pleasures only in so far as they are necessary for the preservation of health..

The multitude always strains after rarities and exceptions, and thinks little of the gifts of nature; so that, when prophecy is talked of, ordinary k….

If facts conflict with a theory, either the theory must be changed or the facts..

None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not..

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil..

Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself..

Speculation, like nature, abhors a vacuum..

Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being fr….

A man is as much affected pleasurably or painfully by the image of a thing past or future as by the image of a thing present..

The more intelligible a thing is, the more easily it is retained in the memory, and counterwise, the less intelligible it is, the more easily we forg….

Nature is satisfied with little; and if she is, I am also..

Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak..

Everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find..

Everything in nature is a cause from which there flows some effect..

As men's habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to sco….