To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind to 't.

Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should really make very different from whathe is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is done.

I consider myself an average man, except in the fact that I consider myself an average man.

It is much more easy to accuse the one sex than to excuse the other.

Socrates, who was a perfect model in all great qualities, ... hit on a body and face so ugly and so incongruous with the beauty of his soul, he who was so madly in love with beauty.

Perhaps it is not without reason that we attribute facility in belief and conviction to simplicity and ignorance; for it seems to me I once learned that belief was sort of an impression made on our mind, and that the softer it is the less resistant t.

Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents.