I seek in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion.
For table-talk, I prefer the pleasant and witty before the learned and the grave; in bed, beauty before goodness.
An ancient father says that a dog we know is better company than a man whose language we do not understand.
We find ourselves more taken with the running up and down, the games, and puerile simplicities of our children, than we do, afterward, with their most complete actions; as if we had loved them for our sport, like monkeys, and not as men.
Tis faith alone that vividly and certainly comprehends the deep mysteries of our religion.
Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.
We every day and every hour say things of another that we might more properly say of ourselves, could we but apply our observations to our own concerns.
I admire the assurance and confidence everyone has in himself, whereas there is hardly anything I am sure I know or that I dare give my word I can do.
Nature has, herself, I fear, imprinted in man a kind of instinct to inhumanity.
How often, being moved under a false cause, if the person offending makes a good defense and presents us with a just excuse, are we angry against truth and innocence itself?
The laws of conscience, though we ascribe them to nature, actually come from custom.
God is favorable to those whom he makes to die by degrees; ’tis the only benefit of old age. The last death will be so much the less painful: it will kill but a quarter of a man or but half a one at most.
Take care that old age does not wrinkle your spirit even more than your face.
He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the sea.
Once you have decided to keep a certain pile, it is no longer yours; for you can’t spend it.
Ceremony forbids us to express by words things that are lawful and natural, and we obey it; reason forbids us to do things unlawful and ill, and nobody obeys it.
To smell, though well, is to stink.
Praise is always pleasing, let it come from whom, or upon what account it will.
I consider myself an average man, except in the fact that I consider myself an average man.
No wonder, said an Ancient, that chance has so much power over us, since it is by chance that we live.