"J'accuse toute violence en l'éducation d'une âme tendre, qu'on dresse pour l'honneur, et la liberté."

"Meditation is a powerful and full study as can effectually taste and employ themselves."

"He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears."

"The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage."

"It is commonly seen by experience that excellent memories do often accompany weak judgements."

"Valor is strength, not of legs and arms, but of heart and soul; it consists not in the worth of our horse or our weapons, but in our own."

"Is it that we pretend to a reformation? Truly, no: but it may be we are more addicted to Venus than our fathers were. They are two exercises that thwart and hinder one another in their vigor. Lechery weakens our stomach on the one side; and on the other sobriety renders us more spruce and amorous for the exercise of love."

"I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind."

"All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth."

"The confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence."

"There is no passion so contagious as that of fear."

"The entire lower world was created in the likeness of the higher world. All that exists in the higher world appears like an image in this lower world; yet all this is but One."

"Heureuse la mort qui oste le loisir aux apprests de tel equipage."

"Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows."

"Desire and hope will push us on toward the future."

"It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in many things more restraint and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason."

"Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition."

"We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life."

"L'honneste est stable et permanent."

"The finest souls are those that have the most variety and suppleness."

"My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened."

"Speech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener."

"I listen with attention to the judgment of all men;but so far as I can remember,I have followed none but my own."

"We are Christians by the same title as we are natives of Perigord or Germany."

"And in this we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves, and so privately that no exotic knowledge or communication be admitted there; there to laugh and to talk, as if without wife, children, goods, train, or attendance, to the end that when it shall so fall out that we must lose any or all of these, it may be no new thing to be without them. We have a mind pliable in itself; that will be company; that has wherewithal to attack and to defend, to receive and to give: let us not then fear in this solitude to languish under an uncomfortable vacuity."