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.

Most of our occupations are low comedy.... We must play our part duly, but as the part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and appearance we must not make a real essence, nor of what is foreign what is our very own.

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

I have gathered a posy of other men’s flowers and only the thread that bonds them is my own.

Friendship that possesses the whole soul, and there rules and sways with an absolute sovereignty, can admit of no rival.

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.

Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.