In my opinion it is the happy living, and not, as Antisthenes said, the happy lying, in which human happiness consists.

Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.

Their pupils and their little charges are not nourished and fed by what they learn: the learning is passed from hand to hand with only one end in view: to show it off, to put into our accounts to entertain others with it, as though it were merely counters, useful for totting up and producing statements, but having no other use or currency. 'Apud alios loqui didicerunt, non ipsi secum' [They have learned how to talk with others, not with themselves]

To distract myself from tiresome thoughts, I have only to resort to books; they easily draw my mind to themselves and away from other things.

Satiety comes of too frequent repetition and he who will not give himself leisure to be thirsty can never find the true pleasure of drinking

Whom conscience, ne'er asleep, Wounds with incessant strokes, not loud, but deep.

Women are not altogether in the wrong when they refuse the rules of life prescribed to the World, for men only have established them and without their consent.