There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.

If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time; it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price.

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mould

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

And I loathe people who find it harder to put up with a gown askew than with a soul askew and who judge a man by his bow, his bearing and his boots.

Man will rise, if God by exception lends him a hand; he will rise by abandoning and renouncing his own means, and letting himselfbe raised and uplifted by purely celestial means.

Men throw themselves on foreign assistances to spare their own, which, after all, are the only certain and sufficient ones.