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| If we possessed a thorough knowledge of all the parts of the seed of any animal (e.g. man), we could from that alone, be reasons entirely mathematical and certain, deduce the whole conformation and figure of each of its members, and, conversely if we | | Uncategorized | |
| If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. | | Uncategorized | |
| Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow. | | Joy | |
| In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate | | Mind | |
| It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get. | | Hate; Love | |
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| It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived. | | Confidence | |
| Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has | | Common sense | |
| Of all things, good sense is the most fairly distributed: everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect never desire more of it than they already have. | | Senses | |
| One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another. | | Philosophy | |
| Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare. | | Perfection | |
| The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt. | | Advertising; Doubt | |
| The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues. | | Mind; Virtue | |
| The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellencies, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations | | Mind | |
| The long concatenations of simple and easy reasoning which geometricians use in achieving their most difficult demonstrations gave me occasion to imagine that all matters which may enter the human mind were interrelated in the same fashion. | | Uncategorized | |
| The principal effect of the passions is that they incite and persuade the mind to will the events for which they prepared the body. | | Mind; Passion | |
| The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries. | | Uncategorized | |
| The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once | | Uncategorized | |
| The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge. | | Knowledge | |
| There is nothing so strange or so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another | | Uncategorized | |
