I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don’t know.

Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook, and a good digestion.

God made me and broke the mold.

I may be no better, but at least I am different.

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

I have resolved on an enterprise that has no precedent and will have no imitator. I want to set before my fellow human beings a man in every way true to nature; and that man will be myself.

I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.

I only see clearly what I remember.

Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.

Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.

Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals.

No man has any natural authority over his fellow men.

Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.

Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don’t know.

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

I may not be better than other people, but at least I’m different.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

He who is most slow in making a promise is the most faithful in performance of it.

No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said that a man who throws himself out the window to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide?

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.