“One must be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.”
“It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”
“If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.”
“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.”
“A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.”
“Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.”
“There were never in the world two opinions alike; their most universal quality is diversity.”
“I quote others only in order the better to express myself.”
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
“A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.”
“I am myself the matter of my book.”
“To philosophize is to learn to die.”
“The Monad, of which we shall speak, is a simple substance, without parts.”
“To love is to find pleasure in the happiness of another.”
“There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact.”
“The present is pregnant with the future.”
“Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.”
“This is the best of all possible worlds.”
“The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.”
“I write for the same reason I breathe—because if I didn’t, I would die.”