These studies are a spur to the young, a delight to the old: an ornament in prosperity, a consoling refuge in adversity; they are pleasure for us at home, and no burden abroad; they stay up with us at night, they accompany us when we travel, they are with us in our country visits.

To reduce man to the duties of his own city, and to disengage him from duties to the members of other cities, is to break the universal society of the human race.

Time is the herald of truth.

Fortune is not only blind herself, but blinds the people she has embraced.

No well-informed person has declared a change of opinion to be inconstancy.

It is not enough to acquire wisdom, it is necessary to employ it.

When I consider the wonderful activity of the mind, so great a memory of what is past, and such a capacity of penetrating into the future: when I behold such a number of arts and sciences, and such a multitude of discoveries hence arising,--I believe and am firmly persuaded that a nature which contains so many things within itself cannot be mortal.