Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.

What kind of truth is this which is true on one side of a mountain and false on the other?

It's not victory if it doesn't end the war.

My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable.

A man must learn to endure patiently what he cannot avoid conveniently.

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.

We are nearer neighbors to ourselves than the whiteness of snow or the weight of stones are to us: if man does not know himself, how should he know his functions and powers?