Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength.

And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain. Therefore, Farewell.

If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time; it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price.

The secret counsels of princes are a troublesome burden to such as have only to execute them.

Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them.

For table-talk, I prefer the pleasant and witty before the learned and the grave; in bed, beauty before goodness.

If I were a maker of books I should compile a register, with comments, of different deaths. He who should teach people to die, would teach them to live.