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.

I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.

Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed, whom I should really make very different from whathe is if I had to fashion him over again. But now it is done.

All opinions in the world agree in this, that pleasure is our end, although they differ as to the means of attaining it.

Praise is always pleasing, let it come from whom, or upon what account it will.

If I can, I shall keep my death from saying anything that my life has not already said.

The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learnt to die has forgot to serve.