Religious people spend so much time with their confessors because they like to talk about themselves.

Why do we discover faults so much more readily than perfection.

If we could have a little patience, we should escape much mortification; time takes away as much as it gives.

. . . long journeys are strange things: if we were always to continue in the same mind we are in at the end of a journey, we should never stir from the place we were then in . . .

Ah, what a grudge I owe physicians! what mummery is their art!

If you are not feeling well, if you have not slept, chocolate will revive you. But you have no chocolate! I think of that again and again! My dear, how will you ever manage?

Gloom and sadness are poison to us, and the origin of hysterics. You are right in thinking that this disease is in the imagination; you have defined it perfectly; it is vexation which causes it to spring up, and fear that supports it.