 Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad. |
| If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil. |
| He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason. |
| Ambition is the immoderate desire for power. |
| Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone. |
| Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character. |
| The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self. |
| I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them. |
| Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand. |
| All noble things are as difficult as they are rare. |
| If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past. |
| One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf. |
| Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words. |
| Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself. |
| Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived. |
| It may easily come to pass that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance. |
| Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself. |
| Will and intellect are one and the same thing. |
| I call him free who is led solely by reason. |
| I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused. |
