“What wisdom can you find greater than kindness.”

“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.”

“Since nothing is less stable among men than those external relationships which chance brings about more often than wisdom, and which are called weakness or power, wealth or poverty, human establishments appear at first glance to be based on piles of shifting sand.”

“If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.”

“The ever-recurring law of necessity soon teaches a man to do what he does not like, so as to avert evils which he would dislike still more... this foresight, well or ill used, is the source of all the wisdom or the wretchedness of mankind.”

“Why should we build our happiness on the opinons of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?”

“I hear from afar the shouts of that false wisdom which is ever dragging us onwards, counting the present as nothing, and pursuing without pause a future which flies as we pursue, that false wisdom which removes us from our place and never brings us to any other.”