Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.

There is a certain amount of purpose, acquiescence, and satisfaction in nursing one's melancholy.

We perceive no charms that are not sharpened, puffed out, and inflated by artifice. Those which glide along naturally and simply easily escape a sight so gross as ours.

Human wisdom makes as ill use of her talent when she exercises it in rescinding from the number and sweetness of those pleasures that are naturally our due, as she employs it favorably and well in artificially disguising and tricking out the ills of life to alleviate the sense of them.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden.

I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future.

Not because Socrates said so, but because it is in truth my own disposition — and perchance to some excess — I look upon all men as my compatriots, and embrace a Pole as a Frenchman, making less account of the national than of the universal and common bond.