Live as long as you please, you will strike nothing off the time you will have to spend dead.

Learning is a good medicine: but no medicine is powerful enough to preserve itself from taint and corruption independently of defects in the jar that it is kept in. One man sees clearly but does not see straight: consequently he sees what is good but fails to follow it; he sees knowledge and does not use it.

It is indeed the boundary of life, beyond which we are not to pass; which the law of nature has pitched for a limit not to be exceeded.

Greatness of soul consists not so much in soaring high and in pressing forward, as in knowing how to adapt and limit oneself.

There is no passion that so much transports men from their right judgments as anger. No one would demur upon punishing a judge with death who should condemn a criminal upon the account of his own choler; why then should fathers and pedants be any more allowed to whip and chastise children in their anger? It is then no longer correction bat revenge. Chastisement is instead of physic to children; and should we suffer a physician who should be animated against and enraged at his patient?

Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.

Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.