Our skin is provided as adequately as theirs with endurance against the assaults of the weather: witness so many nations who have not yet tried the use of any clothes. Our ancient Gauls wore hardly any clothes; nor do the Irish, our neighbors, under so cold a sky.

We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much or more for our posterity, for our family. The practice and benefit of marriage concerns our race very far beyond us.

In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books.

If love and ambition should be in equal balance, and come to jostle with equal force, I make no doubt but that the last would win the prize.

Tis the taste of effeminacy that disrelishes ordinary and accustomed things.

Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest.

The first lessons with which we should irrigate his mind should be those which teach him to know himself, and to know how to die ... and to live.