I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind – and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.
Il n’est rien qui tente mes larmes que les larmes.
For being the more learned, they are none the less fools.
In my country, and in my time, learning improves fortunes enough, but not minds; if it meet with those that are dull and heavy, it overcharges and suffocates them, leaving them a crude and undigested mass; if airy and fine, it purifies, clarifies, and subtilizes them, even to exinanition.
Tis my humor as much to regard the form as the substance, and the advocate as much as the cause, as Alcibiades ordered we should: and every day pass away my time in reading authors without any consideration of their learning; their manner is what I look after, not their subject. And just so do I hunt after the conversation of any eminent wit, not that he may teach me, but that I may know him, and that knowing him, if I think him worthy of imitation, I may imitate him.
To understand the essence and workings of insanity, Gallus Vibius strained his mind so that he tore his judgment from its seat and could never get it back again: he could boast he became mad through wisdom.1.
I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.
Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry.
Why remember we not, what, and how many contradictions we find and feel even in our own judgment? How many things served us but yesterday as articles of faith, which to-day we deem but fables? Glory and curiosity are the scourges of our souls. The latter induceth us to have an oar in every ship, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved or undecided.
We must untie these bonds that are so powerful, and henceforth love this and that, but be wedded on to ourselves. That is to say, let the other things be ours, but not joined and glued to us so strongly that they cannot be detached without tearing off our skin and some part of our flesh as well. The greatest thing in this world is to know how to belong to oneself.
Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and if they will not adapt to me, I adapt to them.
Whatever it be, whether art or nature, that has inscribed in us this condition of living by reference to others, it does us much more harm than good. We defraud ourselves out of what is actually useful to us in order to make appearances conform to common opinion. We care less about the real truth of our inner selves than about how we are known to the public.
I am not so shocked by savages who roast and eat the bodies of their dead as by those who torture and persecute the living.
Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses.
There is an abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it.
Let us grant to political government to endure them with patience, however unworthy; to conceal their vices; and to assist them with our recommendation in their indifferent actions, whilst their authority stands in need of our support.
I have my own laws and my own court to judge me, and I refer to these rather than elsewhere.
I feel death pinching me by the throat, or pulling me by the back.
Death is inevitable: does it matter when it comes? When Socrates was told that the Thirty Tyrants had condemned him to death, he retorted, ‘And nature, them!’. How absurd to anguish over our passing into freedom from all anguish.
Chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n’est pas de son usage.
One may cover over secret actions, but to be silent on what all the world knows, and things which have had effects which are public and of so much consequence is an inexcusable defect.