A man must become wise at his own expense.
Though we may be learned by another’s knowledge, we can never be wise but by our own experience.
Among the liberal arts, let us begin with the art that liberates us.
If I were a maker of books I should compile a register, with comments, of different deaths. He who should teach people to die, would teach them to live.
The profit we possess after study is to have become better and wiser.
I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well.
My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable.
Wise men have more to learn of fools than fools of wise men.
I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s.
The wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can.
It has never occurred to me to wish for empire or royalty, nor for the eminence of those high and commanding fortunes. My aim lies not in that direction; I love myself too well.
The plague of man is the opinion of knowledge. That is why ignorance is so recommended by our religion as a quality suitable to belief and obedience.
Every one is well or ill at ease, according as he finds himself! not he whom the world believes, but he who believes himself to be so, is content; and in him alone belief gives itself being and reality.
A learned man is not learned in all things; but a sufficient man is sufficient throughout, even to ignorance itself.
There is no more expensive thing than a free gift.
When I am attached by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.
Decency, not to dare to do that in public which it is decent enough to do in private.
Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves, and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses.
Amongst so many borrowed things, am glad if I can steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service.
No man profiteth but by the loss of others.