Everything has been said, and we have come too late, now that men have been living and thinking for seven thousand years and more.

The mind, like all other things, will become impaired, the sciences are its food,--they nourish, but at the same time they consume it.

The doctors allow one to die, the charlatans kill.

There is as much trickery required to grow rich by a stupid book as there is folly in buying it.

There are some souls so base and filthy that they love gain and interest as noble souls love fame and virtue, knowing one pleasure only, that of making money or of not losing it; anxious and avid for their ten per cent; entirely preoccupied with what is owed them; forever concerned about the depreciation or discredit of money; buried, and as it were engulfed, amid contracts, title-deeds and parchments. Such people are neither parents, friends, citizens or Christians, nor, perhaps, even men; they merely have money.

There is not in the world so toilsome a trade as the pursuit of fame; life concludes before you have so much as sketched your work.

If it be usual to be strongly impressed by things that are scarce, why are we so little impressed by virtue?