My chief study all my life has been to lighten misfortunes and multiply pleasures, as far as human nature can.

But the fruit that can fall without shaking Indeed is too mellow for me.

Time has the same effect on the mind as on the face; the predominant passion and the strongest feature become more conspicuous from the others retiring.

Begin nothing without considering what the end may be.

General notions are generally wrong.

Nature has not placed us in an inferior rank to men, no more than the females of other animals, where we see no distinction of capacity, though I am persuaded if there was a commonwealth of rational horses... it would be an established maxim amongst them that a mare could not be taught to pace.

The knowledge of numbers is one of the chief distinctions between us and the brutes.