Every abridgement of a good book is a fool abridged.

The shortest way to arrive at glory should be to do that for conscience which we do for glory. And the virtue of Alexander appears to me with much less vigor in his theater than that of Socrates in his mean and obscure. I can easily conceive Socrates in the place of Alexander, but Alexander in that of Socrates I cannot.

We are nothing but ceremony; ceremony carries us away, and we leave the substance of things; we hang on to the branches and abandon the trunk and body.

We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade.

And one might therefore say of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other people's flowers, and that of my own I have only provided the string that ties them together.

Example is a bright looking-glass, universal and for all shapes to look into.

Of the opinions of philosophy I most gladly embrace those that are most solid, that is to say, most human and most our own; my opinions, in conformity with my conduct, are low and humble.