"I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie."

"There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge."

"Those who have compared our life to a dream were right... we were sleeping wake, and waking sleep."

"It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness. A spirited mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength."

"We can be knowledgable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom."

"The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar."

"Confidence in the goodness of another is good proof of one's own goodness."

"All the fame I look for in life is to have lived it quietly."

"Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves, and to mix a little liberally in their feasts the influence of Dionysos, that good deity who restores to younger men their gaiety and to old men their youth...fit to inspire old men with mettle to divert themselves in dancing and music; things of great use, and that they dare not attempt when sober."

"There are defeats more triumphant than victories."

"Certainly, if he still has himself, a man of understanding has lost nothing."

"Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream."

"On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom."

"There is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is managed by order method and discipline."

"The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing."

"Few men have been admired of their familiars."

"The soul that has no established aim loses itself."

"We need but little learning to live happily."

"It is good to rub and polish our brain against that of others."

"Je hay entre autres vices, cruellement la cruauté, et par nature et par jugement, comme l'extrême de tous les vices."

"One may be humble out of pride."

"We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void."

"A man with nothing to lend should refrain from borrowing."

"Marriage, a market which has nothing free but the entrance."

"I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man bears the entire form of man's estate."

"The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere."

"Il n'est si homme de bien, qu'il mette à l'examen des lois toutes ses actions et pensées, qui ne soit pendable dix fois en sa vie. (There is no man so virtuous that if he placed all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the law, he would not deserve to be hanged ten times in his life.)"

"We undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits their sickness and their health."

"Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky."

"Obstinacy and heat in sticking to one's opinions is the surest proof of stupidity. Is there anything so cocksure so immovable so disdainful so contemplative so solemn and serious as an ass?"

"Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health."

"We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly, and because there are few who can endure frank criticism without being stung by it, those who venture to criticize us perform a remarkable act of friendship, for to undertake to wound or offend a man for his own good is to have a healthy love for him."

"He who does not live in some degree for others hardly lives for himself."

"A man is not hurt so much by what happens, as by his opinion of what happens."

"The worst of my actions or conditions seem not so ugly unto me as I find it both ugly and base not to dare to avouch for them."

"A man must live in the world and make the best of it such as it is."

"He lives happy and master of himself who can say as each day passes on, "I have lived."

"Marriage happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out."

"A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears."

"As for dying we can only assay that once, we are all apprentices when it comes to that."

"Why do people respect the package rather than the man?"

"Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery."

"Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment."

"Every other knowledge is harmful to him who does not have knowledge of goodness."

"Though the ancient poet in Plutarch tells us we must not trouble the gods with our affairs because they take no heed of our angers and disputes, we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds."

"L'utilité du vivre n'est pas en l'espace : elle est en l'usage."

"The world is but a perpetual see-saw."

"No doctor takes pleasure in the health even of his friends."

"Did I know myself less, I might perhaps venture to handle something or other to the bottom, and to be deceived in my own inability; but sprinkling here one word and there another, patterns cut from severalpieces and scattered without design and without engaging myself too far, I am not responsible for them, or obliged to keep close to my subject, without varying at my own liberty and pleasure, and giving up myself to doubt and uncertainty, and to myown governing method, ignorance."

"I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself."