Lying is a disgraceful vice, and one that Plutarch paints in most disgraceful colors, when he says that it is "affording testimony that one first despises God, and then fears men." It is not possible more happily to describe its horrible, disgusting, and abandoned nature; for can we imagine anything more vile than to be cowards with regard to men, and brave with regard to God.

We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.

Virtue rejects facility to be her companion. She requires a craggy, rough and thorny way.

A man should keep for himself a little back shop, all his own, quite unadulterated, in which he establishes his true freedom and chief place of seclusion and solitude.

A young man ought to cross his own rules, to awake his vigor, and to keep it from growing faint and rusty. And there is no course of life so weak and sottish as that which is carried on by rule and discipline.

For table-talk, I prefer the pleasant and witty before the learned and the grave; in bed, beauty before goodness.

Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.