We must learn to endure what we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of contrary things, also of different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only one kind, what would he have to say?

Virtue shuns ease as a companion. It demands a rough and thorny path.

Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter, and the seed, which our soul, more powerfully than she, turns and applies as she best pleases; being the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition.

There are few things on which we can pass a sincere judgement, because there are few things in which we have not, in one way or another, a particular interest.

Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.

Let us a little permit nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.

There is not one of us that would not be worse than kings, if so continually corrupted as they are with a sort of vermin called flatterers.