Writing does not cause misery. It is born of misery.
We may so seize on virtue, that if we embrace it with an overgreedy and violent desire, it may become vicious.
There is a plague on Man, the opinion that he knows something.
Some, either from being glued to vice by a natural attachment, or from long habit, no longer recognize its ugliness.
A man should think less of what he eats and more with whom he eats because no food is so satisfying as good company.
To speak less of oneself than what one really is, is folly, not modesty; and to take that for current pay which is under a man’s value, is pusillanimity and cowardice.
A foreign war is a lot milder than a civil war.
It is a stupid presumption to go about despising and condemning as false anything that seems to us improbable; this is a common fault in those who think they have more intelligence than the crowd.
He that is a friend to himself, know; he is a friend to all.
There is nothing in which a horse’s power is better revealed than in a neat, clean stop.
A man never speaks of himself without losing something. What he says in his disfavor is always beleived, but when he commends himself, he arouses mistrust.
No spiritual mind remains within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its own strength.
The religion of my doctor or my lawyer cannot matter. That consideration has nothing in common with the functions of the friendship they owe me.
Shame on all eloquence which leaves us with a taste for itself and not for its substance.
Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.
As far as I am concerned, no road that would lead us to health is either arduous or expensive.
To know how to live is my trade and my art.
A man has need of tough ears to hear himself fairly judged.
It is not my deeds that I write down, it is myself, my essence.
Lucius Arruntius killed himself, he said, to escape both the future and the past.