The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.

Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm or a flea and yet will create Gods by the dozen!

Anyone who does not feel sufficiently strong in memory should not meddle with lying.

The archer who overshoots his mark does no better than he who falls short of it.

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

.. since it was true that study, even when done properly, can only teach us what wisdom, right conduct and determination consist in, they wanted to put their children directly in touch with actual cases, teaching them not by hearsay but by actively assaying them, vigorously molding and forming them not merely by word and precept but chiefly by deeds and examples, so that wisdom should not be something which the soul knows but the soul's very essence and temperament, not something acquired but a natural property.

If these Essays were worthy of being judged, it might fall out, in my opinion, that they would not find much favour, either with common and vulgar minds, or with uncommon and eminent ones: the former would not find enough in them, the latter would find too much; they might manage to live somewhere in the middle region.