I see this evident, that we willingly accord to piety only the services that flatter our passions.
Man will rise, if God by exception lends him a hand; he will rise by abandoning and renouncing his own means, and letting himselfbe raised and uplifted by purely celestial means.
I am much afraid that we shall have very greatly hastened the decline and ruin of the New World by our contagion, and that we willhave sold it our opinions and our arts very dear.
I honor most those to whom I show least honor; and where my soul moves with great alacrity, I forget the proper steps of ceremony.
This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.
Silence and modesty are very valuable qualities in conversation.
Poetry reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself. Venus is not so beautiful all naked, alive, and panting, as she is here in Virgil.
I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject.
Great authors, when they write about causes, adduce not only those they think are true but also those they do not believe in, provided they have some originality and beauty. They speak truly and usefully enough if they speak ingeniously.
Other passions have objects to flatter them, and seem to content and satisfy them for a while; there is power in ambition, pleasure in luxury, and pelf in covetousness; but envy can gain nothing but vexation.
Fie on the eloquence that leaves us craving itself, not things!
Lay a beam between these two towers of such width as we need to walk on: there is no philosophical wisdom of such great firmness that it can give us courage to walk on it as we should if it were on the ground.
And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?
The beginnings of all things are weak and tender. We must therefore be clear-sighted in the beginnings, for, as in their budding we discern not the danger, so in their full growth we perceive not the remedy.
Men throw themselves on foreign assistances to spare their own, which, after all, are the only certain and sufficient ones.
We feel a kind of bittersweet pricking of malicious delight in contemplating the misfortunes of others.
I look upon the too good opinion that man has of himself, as the nursing mother of all false opinions, both public and private.
No pleasure is fully delightful without communications, and no delight absolute except imparted.
The wise man should withdraw his soul within, out of the crowd, and keep it in freedom and power to judge things freely; but as for externals, he should wholly follow the accepted fashions and forms.
Only the fools are certain and assured.