Chance is a word void of sense nothing can exist without a cause.
Tears are the silent language of grief.
To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.
Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.
Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.
Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.
Speaking of Newton but also commenting more broadly on education and the Enlightenment: "I have seen a professor of mathematics only because he was great in his vocation, buried like a king who had do...
We are all full of weakness and errors let us mutually pardon each other our follies - it is the first law of nature.
Divorce is probably of nearly the same date as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks the more ancient.
The best is the enemy of the good.
Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, ends by making their defects respectable.
He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.
God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
Wherever there is a settled society, religion is necessary; the laws cover manifest crimes, and religion covers secret crimes.
England has forty-two religions and only two sauces.
We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.
To hold a pen is to be at war.
The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.
Religion was instituted to make us happy in this life and in the other. What must we do to be happy in the life to come? Be just.