To speak less of oneself than what one really is, is folly, not modesty; and to take that for current pay which is under a man's value, is pusillanimity and cowardice.

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.

Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face.

In my opinion it is the happy living, and not, as Antisthenes said, the happy lying, in which human happiness consists.

A wise man loses nothing, if he but save himself.

It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine undertstanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits.

The most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles.