Fear sometimes adds wings to the heels, and sometimes nails them to the ground, and fetters them from moving.
A liar would be brave toward God, while he is a coward toward men; for a lie faces God, and shrinks from man.
We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.
In truth, the care and expense of our fathers aims only at furnishing our heads with knowledge; of judgement and virtue, little news.
But the touch or company of any man whatsoever stirreth up their heat, which in their solitude was hushed and quiet, and lay as cinders raked up in ashes.
What am I to choose? “Choose what you please, as long as you choose.” There you have a foolish answer, which seems to be the outcome, however, of all Dogmatism, which will not allow us to be ignorant of that which we are ignorant.
Whoever will imagine a perpetual confession of ignorance, a judgment without leaning or inclination, on any occasion whatever, hasa conception of Pyrrhonism.
We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.
People of our time are so formed for agitation and ostentation that goodness, moderation, equability, constancy, and such quiet and obscure qualities are no longer felt.
The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mould.
Age imprints more wrinkles a in the mind, than it does in the face, and souls are never, or very rarely seen, that in growing old do not smell sour and musty. Man moves all together, both towards his perfection and decay.
As great enmities spring from great friendships, and mortal distempers from vigorous health, so do the most surprising and the wildest frenzies from the high and lively agitations of our souls.
Women are more susceptible to pain than to pleasure.
An orator of past times declared that his calling was to make small things appear to be grand.
Might I have had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if she would have had me.
When Socrates, after being relieved of his irons, felt the relish of the itching that their weight had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to consider the close alliance between pain and pleasure.
The most regular and most perfect soul in the world has but too much to do to keep itself upright from being overthrown by its own weakness.
Truth and reason are common to everyone, and are no more his who spake them first than his who speaks them after.
Experience stands on its own dunghill in medicine, and reason yields it place. Medicine has always professed experience to be the touchstone of its operations.
A well-bred man is always sociable and complaisant.