"The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death"
"If a man urge me to tell wherefore I loved him, I feel it cannot be expressed but by answering: Because it was he, because it was myself"
"If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because it was I"
"There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge"
"The confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence"
"I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly"
"Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's opinion is the best proof of stupidity"
"It is not death, it is dying that alarms me"
"The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre"
"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"
"If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves"
"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"
"I quote others only in order the better to express myself"
"Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly"
"When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her"
"We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void"
"We can be knowledgable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom"
"We are Christians by the same title as we are natives of Perigord or Germany"
"Virtue rejects facility to be her companion. She requires a craggy, rough and thorny way"
"Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul"
"There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves"
"There are some defeats more triumphant than victories"
"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"
"The world is but a perpetual see-saw"
"The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing"
"The way of the world is to make laws, but follow custom"
"The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will"
"The thing I fear most is fear"
"The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage"
"The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere"
"One may be humble out of pride"
"Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul"
"Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being"
"Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know"
