Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.
All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
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.
I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.
Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.
There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.
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.
Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.
The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.
I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.
To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man. Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.
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.
Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.
God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.
If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.
Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.
None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.
