A man may by custom fortify himself against pain, shame, and suchlike accidents; but as to death, we can experience it but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it.
There are few things on which we can pass a sincere judgement, because there are few things in which we have not, in one way or another, a particular interest.
All opinions in the world agree in this, that pleasure is our end, although they differ as to the means of attaining it.
Is it not enough to make me come back to life out of spite, to have someone who spat in my face while I existed come and rub my feet when I am beginning to exist no longer?
We have the pleasures suitable to our lot; let us not usurp those of greatness. Ours are more natural and all the more solid and sure for being humbler. Since we will not do so out of conscience, at least out of ambition let us reject ambition.
We cannot fail in following nature.
Whatever can be done another day can be done today.
What fear has once made me will, I am bound still to will when without fear.
If my intentions were not to be read in my eyes and voice, I should not have survived so long without quarrels and without harm, seeing the indiscreet freedom with which I say, right or wrong, whatever comes into my head.
I say that male and female are cast in the same mold; except for education and habits, the difference is not great.
What a wonderful thing it is that drop of seed, from which we are produced, bears in itself the impressions, not only of the bodily shape, but of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers!
Aesop, that great man, saw his master making water as he walked. “What!” he said, “Must we void ourselves as we run?” Use our timeas best we may, yet a great part of it will still be idly and ill spent.
I have a vocabulary all my own. I “pass the time” when it is wet and disagreeable. When it is fine I do not wish to pass it; I ruminate it and hold on to it. We should hasten over the bad, and settle upon the good.
I see this evident, that we willingly accord to piety only the services that flatter our passions.
Man will rise, if God by exception lends him a hand; he will rise by abandoning and renouncing his own means, and letting himselfbe raised and uplifted by purely celestial means.
I am much afraid that we shall have very greatly hastened the decline and ruin of the New World by our contagion, and that we willhave sold it our opinions and our arts very dear.
I honor most those to whom I show least honor; and where my soul moves with great alacrity, I forget the proper steps of ceremony.
This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.
Silence and modesty are very valuable qualities in conversation.
Poetry reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself. Venus is not so beautiful all naked, alive, and panting, as she is here in Virgil.