Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another’s great tribulation; not because any man’s troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive you are free of them yourself is pleasant.
It is great wealth to a soul to live frugally with a contented mind.
What can give us more sure knowledge than our senses? How else can we distinguish between the true and the false?
Whenever anything changes and quits its proper limits, this change is at once the death of that which was before.
The first beginnings of things cannot be distinguished by the eye.
Such crimes has superstition caused.
Under what law each thing was created, and how necessary it is for it to continue under this, and how it cannot annul the strong rules that govern its lifetime.
Air, I should explain, becomes wind when it is agitated.
For fools admire and love those things they see hidden in verses turned all upside down, and take for truth what sweetly strokes the ears and comes with sound of phrases fine imbued.
It’s easier to avoid the snares of love than to escape once you are in that net whose cords and knots are strong; but even so, enmeshed, entangled, you can still get out unless, poor fool, you stand in your own way.
So much wrong could religion induce.
Not they who reject the gods are profane, but those who accept them.
There is no place in nature for extinction.
Violence and injury enclose in their net all that do such things, and generally return upon him who began.
The wailing of the newborn infant is mingled with the dirge for the dead.
If men saw that a term was set to their troubles, they would find strength in some way to withstand the hocus-pocus and intimidations of the prophets.
We notice that the mind grows with the body, and with it decays.
Time by itself does not exist; but from things themselves there results a sense of what has already taken place, what is now going on and what is to ensue. It must not be claimed that anyone can sense time by itself apart from the movement of things.
Nothing appears as it should in a world where nothing is certain. The only certain is the existence of a secret violence that makes everything uncertain.
To truly take the measure of a man, you must observe him in the midst of trial and tribulation-then, from the bottom of their hearts, men say what they believe; the mask is torn away, and what remains cannot deceive.
Nada puede tocar ni ser tocado si no es cuerpo.