An orator of past times declared that his calling was to make small things appear to be grand.

And one might therefore say of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other people's flowers, and that of my own I have only provided the string that ties them together.

What am I to choose? "Choose what you please, as long as you choose." There you have a foolish answer, which seems to be the outcome, however, of all Dogmatism, which will not allow us to be ignorant of that which we are ignorant.

The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from Custom.

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

Women when they marry buy a cat in the bag.

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold...The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.