Ambition is not a vice of little people.
He was doubtless an understanding Fellow that said, there was no happy Marriage but betwixt a blind Wife and a deaf Husband.
The world always looks straights ahead; as for me, I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it busy. Everyone looks in front of him: as for me, I look inside me: I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself. Others...they always go forward; as for me, I roll about in myself.
[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.
I have often seen people uncivil by too much civility, and tiresome in their courtesy.
Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.
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.
We are born to inquire into truth; it belongs to a greater to possess it
I would rather produce my passions than brood over them at my expense; they grow languid when they have vent and expression. It is better that their point should operate outwardly than be turned against us.
We have so much ill fortune as inconstancy, or so much bad purpose as folly, we are not so full of evil as we are of inanity; we are not so wretched as we are base
Few men have been admired of their familiars.
Reason has so many forms that we do not know which to choose-Experiment has no fewer.
The first distinction among men, and the first consideration that gave one precedence over another, was doubtless the advantage of beauty.
God is favorable to those whom he makes to die by degrees; 'tis the only benefit of old age. The last death will be so much the less painful: it will kill but a quarter of a man or but half a one at most.
The diversity of physical arguments and opinions embraces all sorts of methods.
There is nothing in which a horse's power is better revealed than in a neat, clean stop.
Is it reasonable that even the arts should take advantage of and profit by our natural stupidity and feebleness of mind?
If to take up books were to take them in, and if to see them were to consider them, and to run through them were to grasp them, I should be wrong to make myself out quite as ignorant as I say I am.
The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.
Not because Socrates said so,... I look upon all men as my compatriots.
Men do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like silkworms, and is suffocated in it. A mouse in a pitch barrel...thinks it notices from a distance some sort of glimmer of imaginary light and truth; but while running toward it, it is crossed by so many difficulties and obstacles, and diverted by so many new quests, that it strays from the road, bewildered.
Travelling through the world produces a marvellous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose.
How often, being moved under a false cause, if the person offending makes a good defense and presents us with a just excuse, are we angry against truth and innocence itself?
We every day and every hour say things of another that we might more properly say of ourselves, could we but apply our observations to our own concerns.
Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long, nor short, to things that are no more.
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