Marriage can be compared to a cage: birds outside it despair to enter, and birds within, to escape.

I seek in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion.

Let every foot have its own shoe.

If you have known how to compose your life, you have done a great deal more than the person who knows how to compose a book. You have done more than the one who has taken cities and empires.

Most of our occupations are low comedy.... We must play our part duly, but as the part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and appearance we must not make a real essence, nor of what is foreign what is our very own.

We should rather examine, who is better learned, than who is more learned.

For table-talk, I prefer the pleasant and witty before the learned and the grave; in bed, beauty before goodness.