If others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself.
How many quarrels, and how important, has the doubt as to the meaning of this syllable “Hoc” produced for the world!
It is a rare life that remains orderly even in private.
There is nothing useless in nature; not even uselessness itself.
Everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.
Men of simple understanding, little inquisitive and little instructed, make good Christians.
Death pays all debts.
Men are nothing until they are excited.
You have your face bare; I am all face.
I may indeed very well happen to contradict myself; but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict.
Whom conscience, ne’er asleep, Wounds with incessant strokes, not loud, but deep.
To make a crooked stick straight, we bend it the contrary way.
When we have got it, we want something else.
When we see a man with bad shoes, we say it is no wonder, if he is a shoemaker.
The receipts of cookery are swelled to a volume, but a good stomach excels them all; to which nothing contributes more than industry and temperance.
We ought to love temperance for itself, and in obedience to God who has commanded it and chastity; but what I am forced to by catarrhs, or owe to the stone, is neither chastity nor temperance.
To make judgements about great and lofty things, a soul of the same stature is needed; otherwise we ascribe to them that vice which is our own.
Every one’s true worship was that which he found in use in the place where he chanced to be.
Every period of life has its peculiar prejudices; whoever saw old age, that did not applaud the past, and condemn the present times?
No one but yourself knows whether you are cowardly and cruel, or loyal and devout; others do not see you; they surmise you by uncertain conjectures; they perceive not so much your nature as your art.