To know how to live is my trade and my art.

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

Like the watermen who advance forward while they look backward.

We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much or more for our posterity, for our family. The practice and benefit of marriage concerns our race very far beyond us.

No pleasure is fully delightful without communications, and no delight absolute except imparted.

If others surpass you in knowledge, in charm, in strength, in fortune, you have other causes to blame for it; but if you yield tothem in stoutness of heart you have only yourself to blame.

Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm or a flea and yet will create Gods by the dozen!