Each person calls barbarism whatever is not his or her own practice.... We may call Cannibals barbarians, in respect to the rulesof reason, but not in respect to ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.

We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.

We may so seize on virtue, that if we embrace it with an overgreedy and violent desire, it may become vicious.

Almost all the opinions we have are taken on authority and on credit.

It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.

There is a huge gulf between the man who follows the conventions and laws of his country and the man who sets out to regiment them and to change them.

My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense, experience, and practice, let him orderthe architect to speak of buildings not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to another man's knowledge, not according to his own.