To philosophize is to doubt.
Is it not better to remain in suspense than to entangle yourself in the many errors that the human fancy has produced? Is it not better to suspend your convictions than to get mixed up in these seditious and quarrelsome divisions?
A man should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, quite unadulterated, in which he establishes his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude.
Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.
Our own peculiar human condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.
The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.
There is nothing so noble and so right as to play our human life well and fitly, nor anything so difficult to learn as how to livethis life well and according to Nature.
We perceive no charms that are not sharpened, puffed out, and inflated by artifice. Those which glide along naturally and simply easily escape a sight so gross as ours.
Truly it is reasonable to make a great distinction between the faults that come from our weakness and those that come from our wickedness.
In my youth I studied for ostentation; later, a little to gain wisdom; now, for recreation; never for gain.
Who ever saw a doctor use the prescription of his colleague without cutting out or adding something?
The most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles.
The most universal quality is diversity.
I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden.
The man who thinks he knows does not yet know what knowing is.
There is no wish more natural than the wish to know.
The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little.
And one might therefore say of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other people’s flowers, and that of my own I have only provided the string that ties them together.
I must use these great men’s virtues as a cloak for my weakness.
We are born to inquire into truth; it belongs to a greater to possess it.