You have your face bare; I am all face.

The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.

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

We find ourselves more taken with the running up and down, the games, and puerile simplicities of our children, than we do, afterward, with their most complete actions; as if we had loved them for our sport, like monkeys, and not as men.

To how many blockheads of my time has a cold and taciturn demeanor procured the credit of prudence and capacity!

Disappointment and feebleness imprint upon us a cowardly and valetudinarian virtue.

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