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.

We may so seize on virtue, that if we embrace it with an overgreedy and violent desire, it may become vicious.

I look upon the too good opinion that man has of himself, as the nursing mother of all false opinions, both public and private.

The memory represents to us not what we choose but what it pleases.

I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.

The first distinction among men, and the first consideration that gave one precedence over another, was doubtless the advantage of beauty.

Virtue can have naught to do with ease. . . . It craves a steep and thorny path.