Thus every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.

To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.

A good style must, first of all, be clear. It must not be mean or above the dignity of the subject. It must be appropriate.

The art of wealth-getting which consists in household management, on the one hand, has a limit; the unlimited acquisition of wealth is not its business. And therefore, in one point of view, all riches must have a limit; nevertheless, as a matter of fact, we find the opposite to be the case; for all getters of wealth increase their hard coin without limit.

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

The bad man is continually at war with, and in opposition to, himself.

...The entire preoccupation of the physicist is with things that contain within themselves a principle of movement and rest.