Custom is a second nature, and no less powerful.

I agree that we should work and prolong the functions of life as far as we can, and hope that Death may find me planting my cabbages, but indifferent to him and still more to the unfinished state of my garden.

The bees pillage the flowers here and there but they make honey of them which is all their own; it is no longer thyme or marjolaine: so the pieces borrowed from others he will transform and mix up into a work all his own.

A foreign war is a lot milder than a civil war.

Virtue rejects facility to be her companion. She requires a craggy, rough and thorny way.

Men are tormented by the opinions they have of things, and not the things themselves.

Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained, than that of bees?