We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.

This notion [skepticism] is more clearly understood by asking "What do I know?"

Their pupils and their little charges are not nourished and fed by what they learn: the learning is passed from hand to hand with only one end in view: to show it off, to put into our accounts to entertain others with it, as though it were merely counters, useful for totting up and producing statements, but having no other use or currency. 'Apud alios loqui didicerunt, non ipsi secum' [They have learned how to talk with others, not with themselves]

It is an injustice that an old, broken, half-dead father should enjoy alone, in a corner of his hearth, possessions that would suffice for the advancement and maintenance of many children.

Philosophical discussions habitually make men happy and joyful not frowning and sad.

My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable.

To philosophize is nothing else than to prepare oneself for death.