Compassion is the basis of morality.

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.

Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Man is not the creature of circumstances, Circumstances are the creatures of men.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

Sometimes one creates a dynamic impression by saying something, and sometimes one creates as significant an impression by remaining silent.

A precedent embalms a principle.

If you don't behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.

Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Be frank and explicit. That is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and to confuse the minds of others.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.

It is easy to be brave at a safe distance.

The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.