“All men naturally hate one another. They employ lust as far as possible in the service of the public weal. But this is only a pretence and a false image of love; for at bottom it is only hate.”

“Kind words do not cost much. They never blister the tongue or lips. They make other people good-natured. They also produce their own image on men's souls, and a beautiful image it is.”

“Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other.”

“The only religion which is against nature, against common sense and against our pleasures is the only one which has always existed.”

“The true religion would have to teach greatness and wretchedness, inspire self-esteem and self-contempt, love and hate.”

“Nobody is publicly accepted as an expert on poetry unless he displays the sign of poet, mathematician, etc., but universal men want no sign and make hardly any distinction between the crafts of poet and embroiderer.Universal men are not called poets or mathematicians, etc. But they are all these things and judges of them too. No one could guess what they are, and they will talk about whatever was being talked about when they came in. One quality is not more noticeable in them than another, unless it becomes necessary to put it into practice, and then we remember it.”

“Why should I choose to divide my ethics into four rather than six? Why should I define virtue as four, or two, or one? Why as desist and resist rather than 'follow nature' or 'discharge your private business without injustice', like Plato, or anything else?'But,' you will say, 'there everything is summed up in a word. - 'Yes, but that is no good unless you explain it.' And when you come to explain it, as soon as you open up this precept which contains all the others, out they all come in the original confusion that you wanted to avoid. Thus when they are all enclosed in one they are concealed and useless, as if they were in a box, and they only come to light in their natural confusion. Nature has laid them down, without enclosing one inside another.”