Part 24

“Egotism is the most common and most hated of all vices. Properly speaking, it is the only one which should be hated.”

“The pleasures of self-love are the only ones that can really be turned into ridicule.”

“I do not know why these two expressions, good sense and common sense, are confounded. There is nothing less common than good sense.”

“The strain of suffering causes the mind to decay.”

We will quote one of those misanthropic sallies the rarity of which we are glad to remark:

“It must be that all honest people are in the galleys; only knaves are to be met with elsewhere.”

But serenity of mind returns immediately after the above:

“I rejoice for all the misfortunes which might have happened to me, and which I have escaped.”

“Life is a short enough passage. I am half the journey. I will complete the remainder as I can.”

“Hope being the greatest of all blessings, it is necessary, in order to be happy, to sacrifice the present to the future.”

“Let us not be exacting; perfection is so rare.”

“Indulgence! Indulgence!”

“The more nearly an object approaches perfection, the more we notice its slightest defects.”

“To neglect the opportunity of an innocent pleasure is a loss to ourselves. It is to act like a spendthrift.”

“Recherché pleasures cause simple pleasures to lose all their attractions.”

“It may sometimes be necessary to yield the right, but how is one to recover it when wanted?”

“Love is almost the only passion that the good man may avow. It is the only one which accords with delicacy.”

“Do nothing that all the world may not know.”

“The truly wise man is he who loves virtue for its own sake.”

“We say that man is an egotist, and nevertheless his sweetest pleasures come to him through others. He only tastes them on condition of sharing them.”

“If one could continually satisfy his desires, he would never have time to desire. Happiness then is necessarily composed of alternatives. It could not exist at a constant level.”

On the subject of nations and conquerors:

“To each conqueror can be said, when he has ceased tormenting our poor globe, ‘Would you not have been able to tilt equally well against a little globe of pasteboard?’”

“The laws of war, do they say? As if war were not the destruction of all laws.”

“War has been represented as necessary to prevent the too rapid increase of the population, but war mows down the flower of the young men, while it spares the men disgraced by nature. Hence it tends to the degeneration of the species.”

Then the writer turns his shafts against medicine:

“In some respects medicine is directly opposed to the will of nature, which tends to perpetuate the strongest and best of the species, and to abandon the delicate to a thousand forms of destruction. This is what occurs among animals and savage men. Only the most robust attain the adult age, and these only reproduce the species. Medicine and the aids of the social state prolong the lives of feeble creatures whose posterity is usually equally feeble. Among the Spartans, barbarous regulations put an end to the existence of malformed infants, that the strength and beauty of the race might be preserved. Such regulations are antipathetic to our customs; nevertheless it might be desirable that we should devote ourselves to the preservation of the human race from the causes of weakness and degeneracy.”

“The decadence of the Greeks and Romans without change of race proves the influence of institutions upon customs.”