How would it be possible if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

Nothing in nature is by chance... Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.

A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.

Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak.

In the mind there is no absolute or free will.

The terms good and bad indicate no positive quality in things regarded in themselves, but are merely modes of thinking or notions, which we form from the comparison of things one with another. Thus one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance, music is good for him that is melancholy, bad for him that mourns; for him that is deaf; it is neither good nor bad.

The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.