Tortures are a dangerous invention, and seem to be a test of endurance rather than of truth.

There is nothing of evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that death is no evil; to know how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint.

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.

I am much afraid that we shall have very greatly hastened the decline and ruin of the New World by our contagion, and that we willhave sold it our opinions and our arts very dear.

I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.

I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.

The profit we possess after study is to have become better and wiser.