Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.

I have seen people rude by being over-polite.

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

Diogenes was asked what wine he liked best; and he answered as I would have done when he said, "Somebody else's".

It is not death, it is dying that alarms me.

Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light; for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.

I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else's.