In all climates, under all skies, man's happiness is always somewhere else.

Men do not so much hate an evil-doer, or evil itself, as they hate the man who calls evil by its real name.

The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one s own knowledge is not to overstep them.

There are some centuries which - apart from everything else - in the art and other disciplines presume to remake everything because they know how to make nothing.

People are ridiculous only when they try or seem to be that which they are not.

He who travels much has this advantage over others – that the things he remembers soon become remote, so that in a short time they acquire the vague and poetical quality which is only given to other things by time. He who has not traveled at all has this disadvantage – that all his memories are of things present somewhere, since the places with which all his memories are concerned are present.

Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age.