An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.

The receipts of cookery are swelled to a volume, but a good stomach excels them all; to which nothing contributes more than industry and temperance.

I consider it equal injustice to set our heart against natural pleasures and to set our heart too much on them. We should neither pursue them, nor flee them; we should accept them.

A good marriage ... is a sweet association in life: full of constancy, trust, and an infinite number of useful and solid services and mutual obligations.

Who ever saw a doctor use the prescription of his colleague without cutting out or adding something?

If these Essays were worthy of being judged, it might fall out, in my opinion, that they would not find much favour, either with common and vulgar minds, or with uncommon and eminent ones: the former would not find enough in them, the latter would find too much; they might manage to live somewhere in the middle region.

For there is no air that men so greedily draw in, that diffuses itself so soon, and that penetrates so deep as that of license.